well, i certainly hope oh, excuse me. sorry, go ahead. sorry, actually? no, go ahead. it s a good question. in part, i think some of the context is relevant because some of the administration, in biden s entire time in office, he s given four billion dollars in aid to ukraine, three billion coming in the past year. and so on the one hand, congress has shown itself to be pretty ineffectual generally, even in the run-up to invasion, when they could not kind of agree on sanctions packages. but you see from lawmakers in both parties that they are, in different ways and at different levels, sort of at the aggressiveness and want to help ukraine. this feels like an issue that should not be particularly controversial. this is one of the best tools congress has. and it s one of the ways that all the lawmakers are calling for more artillery through. and some are pushing to go even
u.s. and these very stringent sanctions packages, the enemy has changed tactics. and they are currently they blocked the city in such a way that they re not letting people leave on their private vehicles and they are stopping people leaving stopping civilians leaving the city. and what they are doing now is they are using mobile cremation machines and also taking people out of taking bodies of the dead in the streets and the dead from collapsing buildings, they re taking them out into the territory not controlled by ukraine and destroying the bodies there. so they re hiding since the emergence of the evidence of war crimes in bucha and the evidence of genocide, they are now hiding the evidence and using these
week, the horrific atrocities the bucha and the train station, the european unions are already now having discussions on their sixth round of sanctions packages. which will likely include maybe oil, natural gas is a little bit harder, and germany and other states in particular are extremely reliant on russian natural gas. one in every two german homes is heated by russian gas. so replacing those extremes is going to be very, very difficult. it s going to cause problems. to get back to the domestic conversation, before passing the measures, the state did give in to kentucky senator rand paul s demands not to change i want to be very specific with this, not to change language in the global magnitsky act, which he says would give the branch too much power to pursue those accused of human rights abuses. why would that have been a sticking point in these two
saying zelensky shouldn t have spoken out like that. yeah, probably was not helpful. i mean there s no doubt about that. but the bottom line is this russians are preparing for an invasion. they are massing substantial combat power along the border. i think the situation is dire, i think it s very likely there will be an invasion, although i don t think that s certain yet, the only person who knows that for sure is vladimir putin himself, and there are many, many things that have to be done that do not involve twitter that can help prevent it and if it does happen will make it extremely costly for vladimir putin, that involves sanctions packages, requires arms transfers and many other things that can be done. we got to go, but very quickly, i know you re on the intelligence committee, will russia invade? i think it is increasingly likely that russia will invade. i don t think it s a certain thing until russian btgs start rolling across the border we
the national security council meets to discuss the tensions on the border. joining me cnn anchor and chief national security correspondent jim sciutto and cnn s natasha ber bertrand. natasha, what have you learned here? a white house official is telling cnn that part of the measures that the u.s. is developing to deter potential russian invasion of ukraine, they have developed these sanctions packages against elite russian officials and business leaders that would be imposed if russia did move to attack ukraine yet gep. we re learning these of fishls are in and around the kremlin s inner circle. they won t tell us who is being eyed for these sanctions, they re worried about flight risks, don t want people to have prior warning so they don t move their assets and try to get ahead of the sanctions. this would be a significant move for the u.s. to target people close to russian president