to be an arm chair psychologist, me included, but nevertheless, there s some data points which i don t think we should be ignoring. it started with macron from france saying he saw a different putin and then as you alluded to, this speech he gave, coupled with the rant he gave, you know, a couple of days ago. some have speculated this is isolation, whether it s because of covid or other reasons. i speculate that one of the reasons might be as evelyn was alluding to, what happens after he, quote, unquote, wins the ground war, the conventional war? what is he going to do? that s weighing on his mind because he remembers what ukraine s history was. last time he thought he had a secure pro-russian guy in charge of ukraine, it didn t work out well because there was the ukrainians rose up and threw him out. he also remembers afghanistan and he knows the difficulty of doing counterinsurgency and how hard that is on an occupying force. so those things are weighing on
odesa, but this control of dniepro. you have the ability to control what s happening along the dnieper river. that s important to the next step. let me move to kyiv up close. what s really important as described is the activity that s there that s being contested but when they owned that, they now can begin to bring forces, additional forces in, and they can bring forces down into kyiv. what needs to happen, let me highlight this. you take the dnieper river through the middle of kyiv. now what needs to happen is the ukrainians need to start cutting the bridges across so that if you get russian forces on one side and russian forces on the other, they can t support each other and the advantage goes to the defender at that point. wow. i mean, it s amazing when you look at that. just the importance. when you think about where we are, all the modern technology, the power of a river.
terrorists. now you have a cold, calculating killer on their border, and threatening themselves, threatening their government, threatening their children, their relatives. they have no choice but to stand and fight. and not what we need to do, though, and where we can make a difference is we can begin our programs of continued defensive weapons, offensive weapons. we can provide a lend/lease program. look, we re not talking right now about sending in our troops into ukraine because we don t have a legal authorization to do so. but we can most certainly provide them with lethal weapons to help defend themselves. i think the american people understand freedom and they understand what it means to defend your country. yes. that s something we all have in common with ukrainians. yes indeed. let me ask you one quick follow up to that that is very important now. obviously it s clear there will be no u.s. troops on the ground in ukraine. that would be a direct war between two nuclear s
against the nazis. brian todd reporting, thanks very much. i ll be back in two hours, 9:00 p.m. for cnn tonight. and once again tomorrow for a special edition of the situation room. that s from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. eastern tomorrow. in the meantime, thanks for watching. erin burnett outfront live from ukraine starts right now. this is cnn breaking news. good evening. i m erin burnett live in ukraine. outfront tonight, the breaking news. they will assault tonight. those are the words of president zelenskyy. cities across this country are under curfew, including where we are tonight. the streets deserted, the people scared. we saw it today when we had to go to a bomb shelter when one of several air raid sirens went off here. but in these darkest hours of the night now, president zelenskyy posted a zoo warning
he can withdraw his forces once he has a government he deems reliable. but as many people have pointed out, there will be ongoing fighting because the ukrainians are just not going to sit down and roll over. no. steve, so putin gave an address today. in this address he was very animated, leaning forward, much more animated than normal, talking fast. and he told ukrainians not to let, quote, neo-nazis use your children, wives and old people as human shields. first of all, that is a clear justification for killing civilians. you re saying if the other side fights against you, then you have a right to kill their families. okay, it s horrific. i know you are concerned about his mind. tell me why. what do you see when you hear him, these words and see his body language now, steve? it s really difficult, obviously, to read putin, even under the best of circumstances. and i don t think anybody wants