to recruit more than 100,000 new troops into the russian military. wants to bring his overall number up over 1 million troops, reflecting, perhaps, the long war that he didn t expect to have here. i think, willie, it also reflects the combat losses he s experiencing. every intelligence agency now says that russia has killed in action or wounded and knocked out of action somewhere north of 70,000 troops. it s probably closer to 100,000. so if you re trying to run the war from moscow, you know you ve got to replenish those troop levels. here s the bad news for vladimir putin, doesn t look like people are exactly signing up in droves in russia. they are, by the way, opening recruitment to people, men from 18 to 60 years old, willie. think about that for a minute. wow. i m in my 60s. i don t think the navy is
the degree that it can t do the kinds of things that it has done when it invaded ukraine. the first step in winning is believing you can win. they believe we can win. laura: we can win. is congress voting? has there been a declaration of war we are not aware of? what a telling slip of the tongue from the defense secretary yesterday while visiting kyiv. senior u.s. military officers at our facility in poland describing and accelerating logistical network for supplying weapons and materiel to ukraine as well as regional effort to increase troop levels and exercises with nato members along the lines of the eastern flank. what s going on here? john daniel davidson wrote the biden administration is openly pursuing a policy of escalation in ukraine. it s hard to disagree with this assessment. good to see you.
de efforts made to advance from the northwest. and getting supplies directly in from russia. there s a short supply route there. the russians will be using or continuing to use to build up their troop levels here in the east to try to squeeze locations such as where i am. major city in the region that ultimately the russians want to take over. that s namely provinces they controlled about half of those two provinces or over half. they want it all at least and of course russians saying they want to capture the south of the country. i think in all probability what we re seeing now is the first few days of the second phase of the russian onslaught here in the east which is artillery drills. it eased off a bit now. half hour ago we could hear in the distance a heavy exchange.
things are changing. what the president means there is, forget about the idea that we ll keep reducing troop levels in europe and embrace the idea we may have new bases in europe and more troops in europe and more planes in europe, even as we need more troops and planes and plans for china, right? this is the changing situation, geopolitical situation that the administration has had to reckon with since they came into office where they wanted to put so many resources in the indo-pacific and the previous administration, too, by the way, where they were taking troops out of europe to place them in other areas where they believed were priority. but what this conflict has shown and what we are learning day by day is europe is still vulnerable. and europe is still a strategically important place for u.s. presence. and as much as president biden wanted to scale back on military presence in so many different places, he s now seeing that s not an option anymore. president clinton started
are they calling up new recruits, what the mix is there in terms of we don t have a perfect we don t have a perfect sense of their manpower. we know that they have tried to recruit foreign fighters out of syria. they claim they were going to get 16,000. we don t have a number to tell you that they got that many. but we know that they have actively tried to recruit foreign fighters out of syria. we ve seen indications that they have tried to reinforce troop levels from other parts of russia as well as countries outside of russia and outside of ukraine. we know that they are refitting and resupplying and trying to put back into the fight some battalion tactical groups that were in the north that have evacuated or retreated into belarus or russia. we still believe there s not an insignificant number of