thank you, now to retired general mark hertling. so hertling, according to the commander of all the asov battalion in mariupol, now breached the steel mill and engaged in close fighting with ukrainian forces inside. can you talk a battle like that, how difficult to storm an industrial complex, heavily fortified with a lot of underground bunkers and tunnels? yeah, this is going to be really tough, anderson. if they think they ve seen fighting there already it s knowing to get much worse. this is a lot like fighting in a cave and that s something the u.s. army found very difficult in preparing for missions in afghanistan and to a lesser degree, eastern iraq. we built cave complexes at our training centers and we quickly found out how challenging it was for any attacker going into a cave and how very few armed men, defending in a cave, could hold off, sometimes hundreds even thousands of attackers going into a cave. now the asovstal plant is
People. you know, it s remarkable, the video the russian tv was showing of soldiers getting medals in mariupol for the liberation, quote-unquote, of mariupol. when you juxtaposed that celebration, that ceremony, with the images we re seeing of mariupol i mean this russian forces once liberated concentration camps. now their definition of liberation is destroying mariupol. when you look now at images of mariupol. it is a ghost town, just like it s been firebombed, block after block after block. yeah, and, you know, just before we came on, i was reading the news site medusa which is a very fine independent news site in russian, operating now out of latvia and showing photographs of mariupol of soviet imagery brought in by the russians, you know, soviet flags, it s all to
Belarus, said today, dragged on, russian troops weren t repelled because they never tried to enter the steel plant in the first place. fake news they call it. after vladimir putin made a big show telling the defense minister there was no need to storm the grounds of the plants days ahead of that major holiday doesn t appear to be the case, and following in the east, yet to produce any major results. here are the medal ceremonies for russian soldiers in mariupol for what they deem its, quote, liberation. also this odd statue of an old woman waving a soviet flag, an attempt to absorb the city into the russian fold and to project victory but all of it ignoring the fact after 71 days of war, victory is being defined down so a lot to cover tonight, and in just a moment a look inside to what s happening to the soldiers and civilians in that steel plant but first breaking news about the level of u.s.
Televisions what you ve been showing quite brilliantly in the last 20 minutes. what you re seeing is one of the main prop grandists for russian television, somebody who makes tucker carlsen look like walter kronkite was sent to mariupol and act like this is the salvation area that russia was saving mariupol and i think what you ll see by may 9th which is monday, victory day, is a kind of pseudo-world war ii narrative in which russia is saving the ukrainian brothers. even though they re destroying them and killing them and flattening them and just one city after another, the best they can. they re trying to create an image of salvation and so that s what you re seeing on russian tv and that s being drilled into the consciousness of the russian
Wait them out. why go in and storm this plant? it s a physiological factor, anderson, and i ll explain it this way. i m your analyst, cnn s analyst and i m trying to look at the whole theater of ukraine, but truthfully, every morning i wake up with a primary focus on mariupol and this plant, because those soldiers have been fighting in there for 70 days under constant bombardment. no sleep, sleep interrupted, little food, ammunition running low. the desire to protect the citizens, the women and children, so it is not only a physical fight, but it s a physiological and psychological fight as well. and there s, there are some studies on human beings in terms of the effects of both fatigue and fear have some of the same kind of hormonal effects. when you combine fatigue and fear, the kind of fear that comes in combat, it just