region, clarissa just referred to it, pictures of mothers and children being loaded on to buses, leaving for russia, afraid, supposedly, that they re going to be attacked by the ukrainians and the ukrainian government saying they have no intention of attacking that region. and then also, we have president putin today, he met with president lukashenko ohf belaru, remember belarus where all this major military exercises have been held, and president putin said, essentially, there s an easy way to solve this and he said all they have to do, all kyiv has to do is come to the table and talk with those leaders of the donbas region. but ukraine, so far, has said they re not going to do that. and then finally, john, just one other, perhaps, visual that we will see on saturday, these are the strategic military exercises that will have missile and be
as only cnn can, our chief white house correspondent kaitlan collins, chief international correspondent clarissa ward in the ukrainian capitol of kyiv and jill doherty in moscow now, cnn contributor and expert on russia at the wilson center in washington. kaitlan, first to you, obviously the remarks from president biden are hugely significant, most definitive characterization to date of russia s intentions, what makes the president so sure in what sort of diplomat, efforts remain on going? reporter: i think what makes them so sure, john is the intelligence, and the president citing the capability they have earlier there when he was speaking with reporters just briefly on this but what we re hearing from source as really what the president says today matches and lines up with what they have been seeing and reading in the intelligence they ve been looking at and pouring over for the last several days but what s notable from the shift in the president, no one has said this publicly yet,
records, official pieces of paper that should have been preserved. so but we don t know what the motive is. we don t know what the rationale is. all we know right now is that documents they believe are are classified ended up in these boxes. we know this cnn has reported this as well, there was a chaotic exit from the white house where a bunch of boxes were taken and they left. the why is unclear, as as john said. you know, the president any president has a fair amount of discretion over, you know, classified documents and and how they are characterized. but we don t know what he did. we don t know if he tried to declassify any of this and as we know this was not a trump white house big on process. so there is a lot of unanswered questions. right. you also can t retro actively declassify them, right? if you put them in the box when they are classified, he can t now that he is the former president say i meant to
attacking that region. and then, also, we had president putin today he met with president lukashenko of belarus. remember, belarus, of course, is where all of these major military exercises have been held. and president putin said essentially there is an easy way to solve this. and he said all they have to do all kyiv has to do come to the table, and talk with those leaders of the donbas region. but the ukraine so far has said they are not going to do that. and then, finally, john, just one other, perhaps, visual that we will see on saturday. these are the strategic military exercises that will have missiles and be probably quite impressive. they will be held to on saturday. president putin will be there. and this is not to say that they are going to use nuclear missiles at all. i think president biden referred to that. but it s a symbol that they are they can change the
brian stelter, host of reliable sources joins me now. this is based off an actual legal filing, but to get from there to here, what happened? there s always a little germ of truth, and it starts this time last week with john durham investigating the russia probe. here s the cnn headline about it saying special counsel durham alleges clinton campaign lawyer used data to raise suspicions about trump. a little bit of a story, a germ of a story. but it was blown up by right wing media as if trump had been proven right, that he was spied on, it was the crime of the century. donald trump himself said in a statement, at a stronger time in our history, the death penalty would be applied to the criminals here. this is trump is victim, being proven right, even though that is not true at all. this went on for days and days in right wing media until it started to fizzle. it started to fizzle because