viewers here in the united states and around the world. i m lynda kinkade. good to have you with us. ahead on cnn newsroom it s in the best interest of all to permanently deactivate the scorpion unit. activists hail a victory in the fight for police reform. it comes after the release of video showing the fatal beating of tyre nichols. details plus where the case against the officers involved goes from here. donald trump says he s even more angry about the direction of the country as he hits the campaign trail ahead of the 2024 u.s. presidential election. and he has advice for one of his potential rivals. and the australian open men s final is underway this hour. we ll break down the highlights of the match so far with cnn s sports coy wire. when 29-year-old tyre nichols is laid to rest this wednesday in memphis, tennessee, it will be in a city that no longer has a special police unit known as scorpion. activists had been demanding the anti-crime squad be terminat
sidner in new york. this is cnn this morning. kaitlan collins is anchoring live in warsaw, poland. she has some new reporting. let s cabibegin with you, what you hearing? obviously, we are learning details about the details, what happened behind this visit. how the white house is planning this. it was obviously kept secret until president biden was on the ground. he was actually on the ground for some time before we had the white house confirm that he was there, but we re learning that it was months of planning that actually went into this. only a handful of aides from different agencies that were involved in this. obviously, they wanted to keep it an incredibly close hold, because it is such a sensitive visit. what we re learning from the white house is that it was last friday when president biden made the final decision that yes, he was going to be going into this active war zone, right around the anniversary of russia s invasion of ukraine. that s when he decided to go.
More long-range thrartillery. and something that hasn t been discussed much, they need logisticses. we ve given them a lot of great equipment that they can t maintain i ve heard from great reports from the theater that only half of the equipment we ve given them is fully mission capable. they don t have the maintenance training or the repair parts. so we ve got to be able to surge that forward, particularly if we want them to actually win. one of to do that, you have really been advocating for the biden administration to authorize u.s. contractors into ukraine. explain why that is so critical in your view? well, it s absolutely critical, because you ve got to have u.s. and nato expertise on the ground to be able to train them on how to use this equipment. they don t know. they re smart, resourceful, industrious people, but we ve got to train them. they have to have the repair parts. now, we ve got 800 contractors supporting the state department, running all over ukraine, which is
Ukrainian territory. and there are some say that that s exactly what they intend to do. the ukrainians say that since they ve had these longer multiple-rocket systems with guided rockets from the u.s., they ve been able to hit a lot of russian weapons depots, for instance, also a lot of logistics centers for the russians that are a bit further away from the front lines. what the russians apparently have done in the meantime, is they ve moved a lot of their logisticses even further away from the front line to move them out of the range of these guided multiple rocket-launching systems calledhymares that have a range of about 50 miles. so the ukrainians say they immediate to be able to reach further, the places where they have their logistics, their weapons depots, their large weapons depots to be able to stop the russian from doing things like they re doing right now, which is hitting the ukrainians with massive barrages of artillery and multiple rocket-launching systems themselves. the
This morning. jose, definitely movement to the east. i think this is where the focus of everything is going to be, pretty much from here on out. remember, just two to three weeks ago, we saw the redeployment of russian military, through belgograb. you re starting to see ukrainian counteroffenses. you ll see in light blue here these small pockets. you see the ukrainians trying to push in towards these line of logisticses here, and essentially trying to disrupt them. now, the ukrainians are meeting stiff resistance in there. separately, you re seeing this battle. this is the western part of donbas. this is the donetsk region. that s what you re seeing the russians really push for. i want to zoom in just a little bit to give you some perspective on this. if we rewind just over the past three weeks, this is what we re looking atrocities start of the month. you re starting to see the buildup of russian combat powers as they move in closer.