you, the end game you see in the coming weeks as tonight marks a real degradation with the door on diplomacy narrowing. second blinken indicated that the meeting this week is diplomacy is not shut. that clearly would prefer to find a solution that does not involve full scale could the strafk war. that said, as you secretary blinken very, you know, well illustrated to day, literally torn up every major european agreement that they had signed. and so they re going to have to dmon straut. demonstrate. they have to show they re serious about diplomacy. i would add that sanctions don t impact a country in day one. and the this set of sanctions issued today by the united states and by europe is significantly larger than the
the sovereignty of our three baltic nato allies. these are countries that join nato and the 2000 when president george bush was in office. george w. bush. and, you know, these three countries are small. they ve been for a long time nervous about russia. they were one of the first to be subject to cyber attacks by russia. again in the 2000s. so now we re sending more force there s. it s really important to deter russia from taking any military move towards nato. then we ll real you be at war, no cudding with, russia. the that is something we don t want any under circumstance because of, of course, nuclear power. but we will future russia. that s whole deal. that s what collective security is all about. it s been exacerbated by the new movement of troops and developers. because belaruse shares a border with one of the baltic states, with lithuania and poland.
we re not hearing anything. there are no bomb blasts. we re not seeing troop movements. there are no tanks on the street. it sounds as though what we re hearing is possibly a sort of slow boil of a fight. but, you know, one thing i have noticed and just the past 24 hours is a really palpable change in tone from the people that i ve been talking to. when i first got here, people were saying there won t be an invasion. putin won t come in. or this is no different than the threat we faced for the past eight years. we ve been at war since 2014. this is no different than that. the fact is that in the last 24 hours, they have turned, changed their minds. they re now very much believing these assessments that were coming out of washington that only a couple weeks ago sounded alarmist and sh ril and now sound very immediate and very, very real. so people here are flight ened.
possibility for that today. the incursion is already unacceptable. we re going to go live to the region with our reporters on the ground. so we look forward to that. we begin right now with an expert panel to make sense bhaf we just heard. i m joined by a former obama official who is focused on russia and ukraine and host of deep state raid yoe, the podcast. welcome to both of you. evelyn, for people trying to make sense of this in plain english, we hear the president refer to this invasion today, how are we to understand whether russia is at war or how close to it is it to being at war in ukraine? it s a tungs of a war that russia started in ukraine in 2014. it is in the same area where the war is going on for the last eight years. this is a huge escalation. it s a huge political escalation and it looks like it s the beginning of a military
i ve driven down the major highways of where these assaults are going to go. where they re going to come from. and the one that is here north of kyiv, so from the west, north and northeast, of course, they re going to hit ukrainian army force who s have home field advantage who can defend and slow that assault down to where it may take a matter of, you know, days if not week to get into position to get near the city of kyiv. but this, you re talking a real war here. a war that is unlike anything we have seen since 1945. and the equipment that russians are bringing are designed to level cities. they are not going to be using their artillery just to go after these pinpoint precisions.