Transcripts for CNN SOTU Continuing Coverage 20220302 06:45:30 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
that very much would be a very russian playbook thing to do, would it not? yeah. to be clear, i don t think there are chemical weapons anywhere in ukraine but an industrial facility, a fertilizer plant, something like that. bay the way, i think the russians would blame the ukrainians for it as they tried to do with the fire in the nuclear reactor and use that perhaps as an excuse to then escalate, say, we didn t go, we re just responding to them. that i think is the scenario. it depends. remember the chemical facility in india exploded back in the early 1990s killed upwards of almost 400,000 people. if something like that were to happen, near a population center, large numbers of people die, i think that s akin to using chemical weapons and we should respond accordingly. the ambassador of nato under
that i have the room to continue to do the things that i ve been able to do in terms of grow the economy and deal in a rational way with american foreign policy and lead the world be the leader of the free world. so it s not an illogical question for someone to ask. i say to people at home, imagine if we sat and watched the doors of the bunds stag broken down and police officers killed and hundreds of people storming in or imagine if we saw that happen in the british parliament or whatever, how would we feel? and one of the things that i take some solace from is i don t think you ll find any european leader who thinks that i am not up to the job. and i mean that sincerely. it s not like, whoa the point
involved militarily, but they don t say it, right? so, i think there are two pieces to this. i understand that there are high-level connections between the u.s. and the russians in which it has made very, very clear that that kind of use of these kinds of weapons would change the calculus, and if there is a response being contemplated, that we would communicate that privately, not publicly. so that s number one. i think there is a distinction between what we communicate to putin and my understanding is there are communication channels open. i mean, secondly i think there is a need for the alliance of 30 independent countries, all of them democracies, to come together, and that just takes time. i think the nato meeting today did discuss escalation scenarios and what we might possibly do, but there s quiet work under way in the u.s., as you just confirmed, again, on these tiger teams, but also with our nato
allies about what the particular steps are. i mean, this is a big deal. thinking through under what circumstances one might possibly have nato and u.s. forces engage with russian forces is not something that happens every day, god forbid, and therefore it needs to be very carefully considered. i think we re getting closer to that point, particularly if there are weapons of mass destruction used, but one hopes that this kind of conversation is leading putin to think again about what he s about to do. you know, you re a pronoent of what you said is proportional response. they launch a chemical weapons attack, nato should take out the battalion that launched the attack, that that would be the type of response as a way, you said you seemed to indicate you thought that that would at least be that that s the best way you have to sort of you have to draw a line, but you also want to be able to say you re not escalating.