aggressive action outside of ukraine? you know, i can t speak for vladimir putin. that s one of the things that has been the open question throughout this crisis is what is vladimir putin going to do next? all we can do is present him with choices and the choices we tried to present him from the beginning is that one path was a diplomatic way forward, and the other way, if he chose it was a military route, if he took military action there are things we could do with our allies and partners to respond. we could impose devastating economic consequences on him and on the russian economy and those oligarchs closest to him. at the same time i want to make clear, president biden made clear from the beginning, we are not going to send u.s. troops into ukraine. we are not threatening russia. we never threatened russia and have not done it from the beginning and at the same time we want to make sure rereinforce our allies and make clear to russia we will uphold our treaty obligations, and one
a coup. you might remember this time last week we were hearing about airborne operations dropping in here around kyiv. that plan failed. essentially they were trying to go in, drop soldiers in, bring them to kyiv, take the zelenskyy administration out, reinstall an administration sympathetic to vladimir putin. that didn t work. separately what we ve also seen is that the russian military has not been as good as it seems. right now what we have is a situation where there s a convoy. this convoy. this isn t the vaunted mugs military. notice there s almost no separation. one, they fear no air power. two, they re not disciplined, not working in the way they were designed. what s striking about this, now inside kyiv you re putting the city put to siege. you re seeing an increase in indirect fires. also another key point that s happening right now.
and you recognize matt miller from his time working here as an analyst on msnbc. i want to talk about with all of the questions, and this is a question that has been gnawing at me, and with all the sanctions from countries around the world and all of the arms being given to ukrainians by countries all over the world, at what point does the u.s. assess or is there a point that vladimir putin might take retaliatory measures not just against ukraine but against the countries that he says as helping ukraine? thanks for having me, katy. good to see you. we have been clear that we are open to a diplomatic path forward they were offering the russians a way out to stop attacking ukraine, and we made clear before this crisis and before russia launched the invasion that we would welcome discussions and negotiations
things that has been consistent, they are making claims about others behavior that they themselves are doing. we hope there s a diplomatic path forward and he hoped that before he invaded and we continue to hope that but that s not the choice he has taken so far. the federal security service has drafted plans for public executions of ukrainians in ukraine. has u.s. intelligence confirmed this? do you know anything about it? we have raised similar concerns with the human rights council, and there are things we are very concerned about with the way the russian security forces are operating on the ground. look, we already have seen reports, attacking civilian infrastructure, and there s information about troubling behavior that we think russians will plan to engage in, and we
we re talking about huge numbers here. in many cases, not only are the women and children coming out, they may be meeting a husband or a male relative that has been working outside of the country, but that male relative in some cases is going back into ukraine. there s a huge need for a support system for a lot of these people as this war continues, katy. you can t have a mother with three children trying to find some way to support them, going to work without having a welfare system around them so that s what a lot of the european countries will have to work on going forward, because really, nobody thinks this is going to be short term. lots of people we spoke to want desperately want to go back to ukraine, but very few of the people we spoke to believe that that s going to happen in the next few weeks or months even. they want to go home. can t blame them. they want to go home.