belgian system running that. joining us, matt bradley and keir simmons in moscow. matt, you heard sirens going off earlier, you had to hide in the bunker. what is the latest happening where you are, and let s talk about the agreement to talks between russia and ukraine on of all places the belarus border with apparently lukashenko giving promising safe passage to the ukrainian delegation. yeah, i mean, i can tell you, i ll start off with the talks. there s no reason for zelenskyy, the president of ukraine, to trust alexander lukashenko, because of course, belarus was used as a staging ground for these invasions that are happening right now. one of the main columns bearing down on kyiv was coming from belarus. and a lot of the military exercises that were so threatening in the days and weeks preceding the invasion were staged in belarus with the participation of alexander lukashenko. and indeed, lukashenko has
covered in newspapers, and kennedy gave a first speech that was called a state of the union, although he was only in office five days, 1961, to congress. then came the bay of pigs. then came the soviet union surpassing the soviet union sur united states in the space race. kennedy thought he was in bad shape. he went back to congress 25th of may and gave what he called a second state of the union address. he did that announcing this little item which was that the united states would land someone on the moon before the end of the decade. that got all the attention, gave an enormous second wind to his administration. do you think they can change the subject, ambassador mcfaul? they ve got to talk about ukraine. how does he turn that into something that rallies america? well, i do think you can t ignore this giant crisis, this
thousands of people arrested, and that means if thousands are being arrested, that means that tens of thousands of people have the same views. they just don t want to get arrested. this is a war that s extremely unpopular. i think putin has grossly underestimated how willing his people would stand behind him. andrea, including the soldiers in ukraine. i just watched a dozen videos of various soldiers that have been captive. they re there, they have no idea why they re there. they have no idea what this war is about. they didn t listen to the president s hour-long rambling speech that was supposed to rally the troops. that is another reason why this war is going bad for him. the people of russia are not supporting this war. and there are close familiar relationships often between the russian population and the ukrainian population that outsiders might not well understand. absolutely. and there are many of ethnic russians, the city of kharkiv, i have been to the city of
ukraine would have to back down and turn over power to vladimir putin. that s exactly right. and you know, one person who, one former russian official with close contacts to the kremlin described it, frankly, as russia trolling ukraine, pointing out that it s a former culture, russian culture minister who was leading that delegation said if you re really serious about negotiating, you wouldn t have a former culture minister as the person leading that delegation. that just adds to the concerns that this situation in ukraine is about to get worse, that russia may be preparing more firepower and we talked about it last hour. just in the past few hours, the embassy here in moscow telling u.s. citizens they should consider departing russia immediately via commercial options still available. that s as the european union closes air space to russian flights. there is this sense, andrea, of
become with his belarusian state, almost like a subsidiary state to russia. to moscow. they call it the union state. it s almost a part of this idea of putin, of having reconstituting the ussr and a greater russia. but you asked what happened to us today. first, i can show you from you see our surroundings, as you know, you work for msnbc, normally we would come to you with a beautiful vista behind me, but now i m just in a hotel room. that s because we can t point our cameras out of our balcony at the lovely city because we were told yesterday by armed men who came up to our room, police officers who were polite but heavily armed and said that we can t point our cameras out of the window, out of the balcony or our lights, because this city is in a blackout, like every city here in ukraine. they re trying to avoid getting pelted with bombs by the russians. so they have turned out all of the lights all throughout the