means to be the leader of peace. reporter: now, on president biden referring to vladimir putin as a war criminal, white house press secretary jen psaki telling reporters that he was speaking from the heart, that he was responding in part to seeing vladimir putin s barbaric actions. those are her words. we have seen in recent days u.s. officials increasingly using the language war crimes including u.n. ambassador to u.n. and some u.s. lawmakers. we should note there s a separate legal process that unfolds to determine whether somebody has committed war crimes. those investigations are ongoing. wolf. mj lee at the white house for us. thank you very much. let s go to the ukrainian capital of kyiv right now. our senior international correspondent sam kiley is on the scene. he joins us. what s the latest on the ground where you are? reporter: well, wolf, there ve been some detonations
and he threatened to withhold the very weapons that ukraine is using right now, he obviously tried to undermine nato repeatedly, while president putin, his relationship we know, and president zelenskyy and his body language and how uncomfortable he was with this. and it is interesting to watch. do you suspect trump could still see fallout from that investigation? we think so much of the second impeachment over january 6th but this one is still very pertinent to that. it s difficult to assess that. we don t see any signs of at least a criminal investigation going into these steps. we re still not outside the statute of limitations. so i suppose that is possible. but this is part of the reason that we don t necessarily remember the facts of the first impeachment with the clarity that i think we need to understand the currents
invasion of ukraine some three weeks ago. listen to this. i think he is a war criminal. i think he is a war criminal, flatly stating so by the president. the white house later issuing some sort of clarification, saying this is not necessarily a formal designation from the biden administration. it was the president simply speaking from his heart. let s discuss with the chairman of the senate intelligence committee, senator mark warner. senator, thanks so much for joining us. this is the president of the united states calling putin publicly a war criminal. the president slammed ruv for deliberately targeting civilians, hospitals, maternity wards, killing a lot of children. why is the white house trying to walk that back right now. wolf, i don t know how the white house is parsing this, but, you know, the whole world has seen these images of putin s
he is a callous individual, not caring about ukrainian life, a russian soldiers life, but he does care about his own, personal well-being. these things will start to weigh down on him. his own personal well-being, or at least, his ego, has been hit this, week pill phil. president biden speaking out, calling putin a war criminal, and murderous dictator. what is the white house saying about that? well, stephanie, they are saying that that was a visceral reaction by president biden, yesterday. but he reiterated, and doubled down on that characterization today. we also saw secretary of state, anthony blinken today, saying, he agrees with biden s characterization of putin, as a war criminal. what s this done, as it s personalized, this war, and this conflict, between the biden, and the u.s. of course. it is what s happening, and the atrocities are happening so civilians across ukraine, and is acting upon president putin,
make sure that you have forces that can come up this way or this way and either cut off the russians by doing something like this or in a very dramatic move, potentially something like this. the other thing they would have to do is of course get rid of russian forces that are threatening them in this area. this is potentially tough. if you have the right kind of weapons, motivation, it s possible to do something like this. that s what the ukrainians are banking on. . they are high on motivation. we were speaking with one gentleman in kyiv. certainly morale is very high. cedric, thank you so much for taking us through that. . you bet. . we appreciate it. the journalist who protested live on russian television says the majority of russians are against the war, and she isn t afraid to speak out. christiane amanpour joins us next with that interview. and president biden calls vladimir putin a war criminal. so what does that language now