and the civilian death toll mounts, there is still some degree of international consensus about russia s behavior in ukraine. nick paton walsh, cnn, zaporizhzhia, ukraine. nick, thank you so much for that. omar? new cnn reporting this morning on how the war is going. ukraine s western allies are receiving what they say are increasingly sobering assessments about ukraine s counteroffensive, specifically the ukrainian force s ability to retake significant territory from russian troops. so let s talk about this with retired army major mike lions. good to see you this morning, major. so i want to start with that latest reporting that western allies are receiving increasingly sobering updates on the counteroffensive here, which is of course, very different than maybe some of the optimism we saw leading into this. plainly, where does ukraine go from here? so we re two months into their counteroffensive to the day actually today. and right now their counteroffensive has not gained the k
in this bill are the same provisions that came out of committee on a bipartisan vote that existed in this massive defense policy bill the ndaa before the controversial amendments were added overnight, and still the questions remain of the fate of the bill, and it has passed the house, and now over to the senate to take action. sara? and now the discuss this and other issues like what is happening in ukraine and russia, retired army major mike lions, and first the defense bill, and i know you don t want to tango with the politician, and stay in your lane, and this is what happened in the last minute these amendments have been passed, and what is happening to the trickle down of the troops on the ground as they are learning of this, and does it affect the morale? yes, it does. the military families are resi resilient, but they see the
in the east saying that the russians had deployed along the eastern front 180,000 troops, 50,000 alone in and around bakhmut. so, when president zelenskyy tells our erin burnett that putin is weak, perhaps politically in russia. but on the front lines, that weakness is not being felt. now, behind the front lines today, the russians fired iranian made drones on the northeastern city of sumy. there they killed at least two people, injured 19, including a 5-year-old child. kaitlan? bed wedeman, thank you for that. and for more insight now on what is actually happening on the battlefield, retired u.s. army major mike lions joins me now. you heard ben say there, summing this up, we ve been talking about the weakness putin is seeing at home after the revolt we saw by the wagner group. but they re not necessarily
destruction of the camp. nothing is the same as it was. i want to bring in mike lions and bobby gauche. i want to start with you, bobby. when you look at the dynamics right now. you have the political situation in israel. obviously have the long-running tensions, some escalation in the west bank that has been kind of evolving and progressing other the course of the last several months without question but significant weakness in the palestinian authority and the leadership. how does this i m not saying end, i m saying how does this calm down? this feels like it s moving towards another major, major blow out. it does feel like the new reality in the west bank. we ve been unfortunately used to seeing these kinds of images from gaza, but west bank relative to gaza was stable. palestinian authority, as you say, its leadership has been weakening. its ability to control the street has been diminishing. now those images from jenin are familiar to me. 20 years ago, the last time
brought down during that brief 36-hour rebellion. yevgeny prigozhin who apparently struck a deal to leave russia for belarus has not been seen yet. and back to major mike lions, one of the things we re trying to figure out right now is what happens to prigozhin s forces, to the wagner group that s been so critical for russia s efforts to this point? they were here, whether they started their insurgency, threatened moscow but we don t know what s going to make of them, that they have great equipment, they ve got great tanks, they have planes, they have to be fed, they have to be watered. so we re not really sure what happens. i don t see them joining the regular russian forces in ukraine, or in on those front lines there, these are not those kind of troops, they re not interested in getting anymore into the fight. they ve been out of bakhmut, this area here, they ve been out of there for about six to eight weeks right now. they haven t been in the fight for that long. important po