just over the weekend. they needed to cut it short a day because she needed to be back in washington on saturday night. they weren t given a reason why they had to do that. they were just told this was nonnegotiable. president biden as we know left washington in the very early hours sunday morning. she had to be back because the president was leaving. that s clear now. andrea mitchell, it was extraordinary to see him in kyiv today, an active war zone, one where there is no u.s. military presence. people have made some comparisons to former presidents traveling to iraq or afghanistan. i was struck that even the national review has said this was not at all the same. this was a different scenario, and they were praising the visit. can you root it for us in living history, what it means to have the president go there? it s such a big deal. it s not only symbolic, it s important to show that he thought it was safe enough to go to kyiv and to be one on one, face to face, on television, r
message we heard from the vice president over the weekend, accusing vladimir putin of crimes against humanity. andrea asked the vice president about that, and he is going to argue that putin should be held responsible, so more powerful when we hear from president biden tomorrow in warsaw. we have seen aid go to ukraine. any word on sanctions? i know there s limited ability of what we can do when vladimir putin is still in power. you can say he has been committing war crimes, but actually convicting him or prosecuting him for those war crimes is a tall task. reporter: it certainly is. the president announcing more sanctions on this trip, a series of sanctions that the united states and other global and european allies have announced against russia. and it hasn t deterred vladimir putin. yes, it has impacted the russian economy significantly. but the u.s. and ukraine bracing for russia to ramp up and a new
president was going to be in kyiv, he wouldn t have thought president biden. would have been under russian control at that point. he was obviously mistaken. president biden is sending a message to vladimir putin saying you have lost so far, we are going to stay here. we are going to continue to help the ukrainians to defeat your invaders, and don t think that we re getting to tired of it. the second audience, i think, for his message was back here on the united states, same message but explaining why. it was interesting during the state of the union address last week, he didn t spend a lot of time explaining to americans, why ukraine matters to them, why he has invested so measure treasure of their taxpayer dollars in this war. so much resources of the american economy in more than $100 billion under his and congress s plans so far, and here he does that. he does explain why. he explains this is about democracy. he explains this is about american interests, not just ukrainian interests