beyond. she took china to task as well. the letter z it s becoming a symbol of russia s war on ukraine. many videos and images from social media sites have shown that letter on military vehicles near the border. savannah sellers is breaking down what that z means and how our nbc team is verifying all the social media video that you re seeing out of ukraine, talking about the disinformation that we just heard the ambassador talk about. savannah, good morning to you. we re talking about the letter z but more than that. you also heard the ambassador say russia can t suppress what is being seen on social media. we re seeing images out of ukraine. of course to understand the true scale of devastation and there s stuff people have been talking about. they ve seen quite a bit of. on the military vehicles in a
dirty work suppressing protests in russia for quite a while. now they re in ukraine in kherson. that s very troubling for a lot of civilians who have occupation to look forward to after bombardment. another ominous sign there. matt, please continue to stay safe. john, as you know, so far the pentagon has ruled out this idea of sending fighter jets to help ukraine. but this morning you had more than 40 senate republicans calling on the biden administration to transfer them. this is what senators graham and romney had to say. we ll talk about it on the other side. enough talk. people are dying. send them the planes they need. it one thing to be incompetent, it s another to be dishonorable. putin is going to be happy today knowing he backed us down. michael mcfaul tweeted this,
these new sanctions that we were just talking about. the president is en route to philadelphia right now. matt bradley, let me come to you here. again, this new staff that we re talking about coming as russian troops edging closer to the capitol. the russian sanctions now hitting cities to the west, closer to where you are than before. you re there in lviv. reporter: this morning we were awoken with the sound of an air raid siren. this morning it was very early in the morning. we believe it was because of those air strikes on cities. you mentioned niper earlier, that was also bombed in the
week and it just didn t work out. the ukrainian resistance was very stiff. what we re seeing now is essentially a new approach. this is conventional warfare much in the still we saw in chechnya and syria that russia and its allies have used. this is siege warfare. we ve talked about mariupol over the last couple of days. it s already been seized. it s a foreshadowing of what we could see here in kyiv. the convoy you were talking about advancing down here and stuck, it now is unstuck itself and they re really trying to move here, as you can see, in this direction. this is a standard approach, creating blocking position to the west. weapons coming in from poland. that border in the west from lviv heading into key. we saw yesterday, a major battle broke out there. and in this northern corridor here, they re doing the same
central east of the country. so these are places far from the front lines that avoided the most damage. it troubling for ukrainians to see them now getting attacked. what does this mean? we can t really know. it looks as though putin and his army are doing what they ve drop in other cities now, softening the ground, preparing for troop advances and what we ve been seeing in other places. they ve been bombarding these cities, sometimes often in civilian areas and going around them and choking them, circling them off. i talked with people in the town of kherson, the first major city in ukraine to actually be occupied, to be sort of taken over by the russians. i spoke with one man there. he asked that we obscure his face because his city is occupied by russian soldiers, who he says are going door to door, checking social media, looking for people who are