scenario of an incursion along the lines of talking about 1945 as though giving hitler that small bit of czechoslovakia would have been enough. putin wouldn t have the troops there to make an incursion into southeastern ukraine. it seems to me the administration is pretty right all along saying he doesn t just care about this regime. he cares about kyiv and going there. as far as sanctions, john, i applaud the administration for wanting to have these very, very severe and strong sanctions but sanctions will not stop vladimir putin from invading. and sanctions will not get him to withdraw from ukraine if he does invade. it is the only tool we have. we don t have a military
for 40 years, the united states loudly proclaimed its solidarity with the captive nations of central and eastern europe who were under the heel of the communist oppressor. now that most of them have cast off their shackles, it s our responsibility to live up to our pledges to readmit them into the west through nato. jesse: so, for decades biden and everybody has pushed, pushed, pushed nato expansion, nato expansion, russia says no, no, no that s a threat and here we are in ukraine. this is where we are. the d.c. swamp had their history of screwing over ukraine. bill clinton coerced ukraine to give up its nukes back in the 1990s. putin wouldn t have been invading now if ukraine had nukes. trust me. let s not forget the 2014 coup in ukraine where barack and joe biden had a little hand in replacing that pro-russian elected president. now what?
that is the kind of, you know, white christian autocracy we ought to be more like and the team sports nature of the american politics has taken on in recent days. that s what i think is going on. absolutely. the reality is former ambassador mcfaul, to have this part, he s always needling it. putin does. he understands where to stick the pin in because he understands that exists and did it with donald trump and stokes it on the right and understands that any weakness between the two parties, any division he can exploit because he does want to replace us. he doesn t want what you have as a u.s. led global order. he wants it he wants to be equal or superior to us in that order. i wonder from your point of view what he s doing now to me feels
those close to putin. we are talking about the oligarchs and others. i mean, can they be effectively sanctioned? i mean, many are already sanctioned or they perhaps sanction-proofed their lives and money. can they be hurt in any substantive way? the people who are very part of the decision-making, of the chain of command, are hurt but they have been sanctioned before for 2014 annexation of crimea, russia s role in donbas war before the recent escalation. so, they know that they going to and actually further sanctions are only increasing the grip on the economy and on the decision-making in the country. other oligarchs who are not part of putin s circle and this is a vast cohort are probably terrified but they are not really important. they cannot influence putin s decision and the regime stands very unified, so there are no visible cracks in the regime
president putin has raised the spectre of the use of nuclear weapons, saying he s putting russia s nuclear forces on high alert. let s take a moment to look at the history of the nuclear arms race. with one announcement, vladimir putin left the world asking, would he? i m ordering the minister of defense and the chief of the general staff to put the strategic nuclear forces on special alert. russia has the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world, and putin wouldn t be the first leader to give the order. in 1945, the us dropped two nuclear weapons onjapan. they effectively ended the second world war and killed over 100,000 people in 1949. the soviet union tested a bomb at this test site in what is now kazakhstan, then in 1962. the cuban missile crisis almost brought nuclear war between the us and russia, and having come so close in 1968, the world agreed a new arrangement the nuclear non proliferation treaty. 191 countries are