parts of which are held by ukrainian authorities. he s ramped up his propaganda without basis saying ukraine is preparing a nuclear weapon threat against russia, that he says is a strategic threat to moscow. the rhetoric that president putin is using does not indicate that he s cowed by any of the sanctions he hears and does intd cate he s preparing the russian public the world at large potentially that he has that he has potentially the intention to actually go in to ukraine as has been long feared. this is the type of rhetoric that he s been laying out. it s been building on previous days. michael, to you. president putin said the minsk agreement, helping what little it could, to keep the volatile tensions down, no longer exists he announced. what does that mean now? well, president putin never
adhered to the minsk agreement. there was very little adherence to the cease-fire provisions of it. i know that. i was part of the osce. we observed the russians were not moving their weaponry away from the frontline. they were hiding it. the other thing, they were actually blocking, rather than giving unfettered access, to the osce, the special monitor to ukraine. if i could pick own what erin and clarissa said, i m watching in front of me right now lviv television asking viewers, do you think putin will bomb lviv, ukraine? a quarter responded, replied yes. that gives you an indication of even the fear here in western ukraine we re about as close as you can get as a big city to the ukraine/polish border. the other thing i m hearing, a lot of my ukrainian friends to the east are actually thinking about coming this way.
there will be a degree of gratitude. but i think there is a real sense at the moment that no matter what sanctions were announced, that is not going to necessarily deter president putin from his current course of action. so i guess the question becomes, for people here, is there still an opportunity to deescalate? is there an off ramp for president putin? what would that look like? before, behind closed doors, people had talked about well maybe ukraine would be forced to implement the minsk agreements which were traditionally seen as being in favor of russia. now minsk is off the table. the issue of nato s open door policy is off the table. you start scratching your head and asking yourself, is there anything left that could be done to try to forge ahead a diplomatic path? maybe it s not just coming to me right now, but i can t think of anything off the top of my head. which then leads me to go back to the line that president biden said during his announcement
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