breaking video coming in just hours ago, another apartment building in kyiv heavily damaged. a ukrainian official saying it was hit by a russian missile. nbc news hasn t been able to confirm it yet. and you can also see the aftermath of that blast in these photos. this is what many people are facing right now. they re evacuating, being forced to leave everything behind. joining us is a visiting fellow at the german marshal fund and a co-founder of the trans-atlantic task force on ukraine. thanks for being with us. i believe you live in kyiv, correct me if i m wrong, but how are you doing? what are you doing? what s your reaction to everything happening there? hello and thank you for having me. also thank you for keeping us apprised of the happenings in ukraine. my family and i have spent the
we stand united in saying that no violence and destruction is means to attain political gains. we, the european union, remain the strongest group of nations in the world and this should not be underestimated. more immediately, we will be designing urgent assistance to ukraine in this dire situation. we will also be active in supporting operations, including of our own staff in zones affected by this russian attack. european union, together, with trans-atlantic and like-minded partners have made unprecedented efforts to achieve a diplomatic solution to the security crisis caused by russia. but russia has not reciprocated these efforts. and instead, has often for grave
we will not be doing that just because we re told to do so by russia who is dreaming of including ukraine in their empire and holding us and choking us in their grips. that will not happen. then again, why does ukraine want nato? for security guarantees. we want to be part of the bigger trans atlantic family and trans european family. if there s other ways to do it, we don t care what it is called, honestly. we need those security guarantees out. that s not available for us. yes, we will will be pushing out there in the world and pushing for nato and the e.u. and the ukrainian constitution. neil: thanks very much. i apologize for understating your location. lesia, a ukrainian parliament member pushing hard to get in the european union and maybe
and she is demonstrating that depth of the trans-atlantic and [inaudible] demonstrating engagement and commitment of the united states to the security of nato s eastern flank [inaudibleage let me stress very forcefully there is no doubt whatsoever that united states and our other ally went framework of the north atlantic alliance and along with the entire free and honest world we will ukraine and we will try to do our best to make sure that ukraine can be defended. thank you very much madam vice president for coming. thank you. for our meeting today for the conversation that we have had we
defense spend. the trans-atlantic foreign policy think tank, their head said yesterday that chances to increase spending and reverse dangerous cuts around forces will be welcomed in the kremlin. do you think that that would have filtered through, that the president putin will have completely, he was very, they see where our investments, are where we re looking to build up capabilities but also britain has a card to get other nations to step forward with us but we can only do that if we have twice the amount of ships that we require at the moment, if we have, you know, turned around the cuts in armed forces, 10,000 troops were removed in the last defense budget. they need to be changed now. we need to review where these tough decisions that were made, understandably, but we want a peacetime defense budget on 2%, and the cold war, we were spending 4% on gdp, and i simply