assistant secretary of defense, tell us about the ukrainian forces. it s not a strong army. it is not a well developed army. they have struggled with this, in fact, in earlier years, post independence years, even as recently as 2014. there are individuals with no military training who are now signing up to be part of militias, to help fight off russian forces. russia s got a highly trained proper army. yeah, i mean, ali, when i started working the portfolio in the pentagon with the ukrainians in 2012, it was a corrupt military it was a corrupt government. the military had been starved of resources, and then when 2014 happened, they were incapable, really, of defending their country. since then, with our help, they have beefed up the military, not just in terms of equipment but also in terms of exercises. but what they don t have is any air defense or air superiority, and that s what s really worrying about what the president just said.
because the russians can launch a lightning attack using their air superiority, also the maritime systems that they have on the ships in the black sea, they can attack using the weapons from the ships and launch on to land. this is a really horrible situation, and i want to underscore something that ambassador mcfaul said and what the president said. you probably know, for a long time, i worked on asia pacific up on the hill, went to north korea, worked that portfolio hard and when i went back to europe and the russia portfolio, i was struck by how good our intelligence was, even though the cold war was off and we didn t have many analysts on russia anymore so the fact that the president says this, based on our intelligence, really gives me, unfortunately, a lot of confidence that the russians are going to invade exactly as he has laid out, because he would not be saying this if it weren t really based in intelligence. ambassador mcfaul, let me ask you about that, because this i do
general, welcome. good to be here. the second one is about sexual harassment, public housing. the first we can t talk about, russia. i want to make clear you don t have the russia portfolio. i do not. as a result, you re the third ranking member but you are not having anything to do with overseeing robert mueller? no. what happened if rosenstein gets hit by a bus or recused because of his memo. do you take it over then? in the order of succession, yes. but i don t like to engage in hypotheticals on that. i m focused on doing my job every day, which does not include that and i don t have any reason to expect it will. that is why we are not talking about russia. it s not her job. i want to talk about the fair housing act. before harvey weinstein surfaced, a note was put out in november to people who had been victimized by harvey weinsteins in their neighborhood, their housing developments. the fair housing act makes sexual harassment illegal under