vladimir putin may individually amount to much, but when you see the action he s taking, the double down on selling his version of the war to the russian people and to try to suppress anybody who doesn t agree with him, does it show outside pressure is getting through? well, i think pressure is getting through. i ve been thinking, chris, obviously, for all the right reasons we ve spent a lot of time thinking about the ukrainian people and the suffering they re undergoing right now. but i m also sald for russian people, because what s going to happen here is they re going to be cut off from the rest of the world 30 years after the fall of soviet union when they finally became at least somewhat more integrated to the rest of the globe. now a new iron curtain, in effect, is fall across their border. people who used to travel overseas won t be able to because the planes aren t flying. bheem used to have friends in the west will feel nervous about ever talking to them. people at home in r
categorically different than a drone coming in and if the russians see that these aircraft coming in, they don t know if it s a nato pilot, they don t know if it s a ukraine pilot and we run the risk of having this thing escalate or maybe they attack the air field from where it came from. there s so many ways this could go sideways but the right answer is to not do it because as i believe the pentagon spokesman said, this is not they have airplanes already that aren t flying so if they add more aircraft on the ground it s not going to change the dynamic but it does raise the risk so i think this is the right call. shannon: so as the skies become a focus as the ukrainians continuing to ask for the no fly zone that doesn t appear it s initial near becoming a reality. what s happening on the ground obviously getting a ton of attention, the russian army not performing up to snuff by many estimations. the new york post opinion piece said this. the army is not as some of said a paper tig
russian aircraft aren t flying well either. they are delivering some ordinance but they have not shown themselves to be glorious in this campaign. not at all. one thing we have seen, amongst them and others is this casualty count. it s a lot higher than anything putin expected. we still don t know how big it is. in ukrainians are saying it s more than 11,000 russians have been killed. u.s. intelligence is saying it s 2,000 to 4,000. the russians are saying it s a whole lot less than that. do you have any sense of what the real number is? that number is what s going to matter to russians. yoeni don t know that it wil matter to russians. in the russian parlance vs. been grimmer. it s called cannon meat. i don t think this matters to putin. i don t think he cares about casualties the way, for example, the american army does.
supply lines. get realistic here. we are trying to send as many weapons there. it all is coming in from the west. if they cut this off, are we just going to say, well, sorry, no way to get this stuff in? and they re trying to cut off the ability of the ukrainian air force to fly. these are military airfields. the only question is why didn t the russians start doing this earlier? there was an assessment early on that they would target the air force. the reality is the airspace is so contested the ukrainians aren t flying and the russians aren t flying many. the ukrainians have pretty good air defense and they haven t taken it out. yes. they are flying and targeting from the russian side of the border and hitting inside ukraine. but all that being said, the reality of the situation, yes, we ve been hearing about this slow and steady progress in the southern part of the country and that continues.
already have a real problem here with bottlenecks. one soldier told me they have 10,000 people processed and r ready to go and get on plaenes, but the planes aren t flying, you can t get them out, which means you can t take more in which means you get a bigger crush of people every day up against those front gates and taliban fighters. i do have to say, i m being told there are a couple u.s. planes, one on the ground and one or two more inbound and they are expected to fly out tonight. we will see what comes of that and i ll continue to stay close. certainly, from everything i have seen, the situation is desperate. it s chaotic. people are lying in the gravel, in the dirt for two days now with little babies in the scorching sun and the cold of the evening.