In any way. in order to have peace that succeeds, you have to have leaders both willing and able to make a deal. vladimir putin is able to make a deal if he wanted to. he s not willing to. he basically thinks he can do militarily. he s worried if he were to ever make a deal, would he have to compromise that would make him look weak. he would worry about not just the international but domestic consequences of that. i also think the ukrainian price of the deal as gone up, because of atroatrocities, they want thr to stop. it s one of the many reasons we re heading towards a long war. i don t see either side prepared to make consequences, particularly vladimir putin. it only takes one man to start a war, he did that. but it takes everybody to stop one. at the moment, no one s there. as for rand paul, i m tempted to say we ought to be thinking about the air defense systems in
War anymore? if you continue pushing, then the ukrainians, well, they may push you back into russia. they may even go into crimea. isn t that didn t we learn from ronald reagan, didn t we learn from others, that is the best way to get people like vladimir putin to the negotiating table. joe, i would make it clear to him that he s not going to succeed in ukraine. and, you know, as he tries to advance, he s going to meet fierce resistance, ukraine, armed from the west. i think the difference between what reagan faced and what biden faces is this russian leadership is lots less institutionalized. and i just think we need to be mindful of it. i actually agree with most of what we re doing, don t get me wrong, i want to see russia weaker. by the way, russia will be weaker as a result of this war. that s not the issue. i think we need to go back to what president biden said the other day.
Let s be clear, russia s invasion is indefensible and so are russian atrocities. we all start today from a position of moral clarity. russia is waging a war of choice to indulge the ambitions of one man. ukraine is fighting a war of necessity to defend its democracy, its sovereignty and its citizens. war of necessity, war of choice. where have i heard this before. i think from richard haass. richard, also out of that speech, out of that meeting, germany, once again altering their foreign policy in a very significant way, sending the first shipment of heavy weapons to ukraine. saying it s going to give ukrainian forces up to 50 anti-aircraft pieces. they were a major piece of germany s army for about 50 years. and, richard, you know, today,
Agency secretary blinken announced yesterday. our diplomats are returning and have returned to ukraine this week, on a temporary basis. today s travel was a first step ahead of more regular travel in the immediate future. and as we ve said, we re accelerating preparations to resume embassy kyiv operations, just as soon as possible. by the way, directly from the state department spokesman ned price, we ll hear from him at the top of the fourth hour this morning. jonathan lemire how much of this is strategy, the trip to kyiv which is supposed to be secret until president zelenskyy let the cat out of the bag. and the announcement very explicitly that america is going to take a stronger stance in the war and stronger stance against russia? certainly some western officials believe that russia s move to cut off gas supplies in part directly linked to what we heard yesterday from this new working group that was convened in germany with secretary austin there.
And there does seem this was deliberate, this was blinken and austin, we ve known for a few weeks now that they were working, the u.s. was working to get cabinet officials to kyiv, that from the president himself. and they wanted to change the rhetoric. they wanted to talk about the two w s here. winning the war, as opposed to not losing it for ukraine and to weaken russia. and we heard that again from secretary austin yesterday, this is a deliberate strategy, but, richard, you were just expressing some concern in escalation in rhetoric. tell us why. i ll tell you two things i m uncomfortable with, the pentagon, kirby suggesting this yesterday, that we now support militarily pushing russia out of crimea and you of the donbas. not one inch of ukrainian territory ought to be occupied. and that we are prepared to see ukraine use military means to bring that about. that s a big, big policy shift on the part of the united states. second of all, we ll hear more