you to do a live shot in the middle of those air raid sirens, so go protect yourself and the crew. thank you. reporter: okay. let me move to courtney kube at the pentagon. courtney, i want to get to you and these weapons systems. the foreign minister is clearly there s some nato nations maybe not ready to give. what or who is he referring to? so, it s not so much it s a combination of things. it s not even so much that they re not willing to give because they don t want to help ukraine, it s more about concerns that they hurt their own readiness. we re talking specifically about some of the countries right there around ukraine. there s been some reporting about potentially sending some t-72 tanks, the old russian tanks, to ukraine and some of the neighbors, some of the allies who have that, who have some of those supplies aren t able to do so because they don t want to hurt their own readiness. but the things that u.s. officials that we ve spoken with say ukraine really needs
maintain their vehicles is that these vehicles require a lot of maintenance. they require a lot of fuel. and the russian logistical capabilities aren t up to speed. at least they weren t up to speed when it comes to kyiv. whether they ll be up to speed when it comes to places like kharkiv, that may be another story. but they need a lot of work on logistics if they re going to make these things work on the battlefield. colonel, you have drones, you have stinger missiles, javelins all helped defend kyiv. but is that enough to take the fight to russia in the east and south? and if not what weapons do they need? so it s not enough. these weapons are defensive in nature. and when it comes to these kinds of different tactics in a battle space like this, don, what you re looking at is you need offensive capabilities. the tank is one of these. the t-72 is basically a force on force kind of weapon. it allows for an offensive capability. the other things they do need, even though it s off th
outrange in number anything the ukrainians the ukrainians have capable artillery, but the russians have so much it. the russians have some late-model tanks. but they re still fundamentally t-72, what they call b-3s, which go back a generation in technology. but upgraded, modernized, very capable, but a javelin could take it out, for example. you know, if we talk about those technologies. the air power, that will be a big difference, because the russians in 2014/2015, during the first invasion, officially weren t in ukraine. and the battles for eastern ukraine, with the separatists and ukrainian military, they couldn t fly red star russian aircraft. they couldn t play their hand. now they will fly that. but the ukrainians have learned,
reporter: yeah, that s absolutely right. we were quite surprised that was happening. i want to show our viewers where exactly we are. i ll step out of your way for a second here. a little more quiet, this is the last checkpoint before we go into the area where essentially that invasion is taking place. so if we go further down into that direction, that s where we see a lot of the tanks go into or towards ukrainian territory, but really the only place they can go is into ukraine around the area where kharkiv is. you re right, john, it has been a remarkable day that we have seen here in the past hour, hour and a half or so, where we witnessed those rocket artillery fire that, of course, general mark hirtling was the smerch system, one that can wreak a lot of havoc as well and also seeing russian t-72 main battle tanks also make their way toward ukrainian territory, and, of course, the interesting thing there was they were apparently
we have been here for two and a half hours now and we have already seen a lot of russian military equipment move in there. it was all via the road. i think a telltale sign of what you re saying, which is absolutely correct that the russian main battle tanks that we saw, the t-72 tanks, when they rolled past us, their tracks were full of mud. they must have been dug in in one of the fields here. they decided not to advance by the field further because obviously they knew that they could just go via this road and go on to the other side of the border crossing towards ukraine. you re right, we are seeing a very swift advance, we re seeing advance with multiple types of vehicles. you mentioned the howitzers, some of the first vehicles we saw here, a column of them, several of them, another one came afterwards. that is some serious firepower to wrbring to the other side of the border and keep pressing with the ukrainian forces with that firepower from ukrainian territory itself, while at th