right and impacting the morale. this is impacting the russian ability to advance on the ground. it is important to remember this is not solely a ground operation. there are russian planes conducting airstrikes and missiles being launched. this is not definitive in terms of how this is going to proceed. it s difficult to measure exactly how that morale is going to affect the russian advance moving forward, but the russian military leaders do have a high level of morale still and russian president volodymyr putin still believes according to the intelligence officials that he can take the whole of ukraine, christine. natasha bertrand, thank you for that. mark kimmet served as assistant secretary of state. so nice to see you this morning, general. you see what s happening in lviv. two missiles lobbed on lviv were
that essentially cuts off the russians trying to encircle the city. so the ukrainians saying they are making headway and they want to launch counter offensives, erin. thank you very much, fred. i want to go to retired army brigadier general mark kimmet, and he is assistant secretary for internal affairs and the founder and editor of agentura.ru which has been blocked in russia and also a fellow at the european policy analysis. you hear fred reporting that during the day today at six to eight hours of ongoing fighting, massive plumes of smoke and for the first time sort of ongoing small arms fire in very clear battles, what do you hear when you hear those details? well it sounds like to me that we re starting to see an initial offensive into kyiv. it may well be that those small units that we re seeing fighting
thousands of russian troops have been killed in ukraine, this is according to the latest analysis who report sagging morale among russian troops. the nsa saying that the death toll was much higher than anything that has been reported. it comes as secretary of state antony blinken issued a warning that russia could escalate a war in ukraine in a devastating way. we believe that moscow may be setting the stage to use a chemical weapon and then falsely blame ukraine to justify escalating the attacks on ukrainian people. out front now retired mark kimmet and rob lee, senior fellow and expert on the russian military who tracks what they are doing on the ground. in light of the detail of the sagging morale because the
to get odesa, they want that city otherwise it makes it difficult. it s a strategic problem and it s limiting their advance. so general kimmet, arnold schwarzenegger put out a video. it was very well done. it talked about how his father was broken both physically and mentally. he talks about how angry his father was when arnold heroized a russian weight lifter. he wants to break through the truth about the war and putin. here s part of it when he addressed the russian soldiers we re talking about in this conversation. here he is. i don t want you to be programming like my father. this is not the war to defend russia. the ukraine fathers or your great grandfathers fought. this is an illegal war.
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