line fighters in ukraine, including several hundred javelin tank missiles, and nato supplying man power to europe. and five western embassies are pulling out part of their staff, warnings from the u.s. about an imminent attack in ukraine, and ukrainian officials giving a strange different message. the defense messenger saying don t panic, don t pack your bags, it could be weeks away. russia does not have enough forces on the border to attack. puzzling to people, different messages, one from the u.s. and the west, and the other from their own officials. admiral kirby, back in. steve stand by, steve has a question for the admiral, important to cover from every side. steve. admiral, what do you make of the fact you have a defense minister telling the ukrainians
with 120,000 russian troops on the border don t pack your back. the foreign minister saying it could be weeks away, they don t have enough troops massed on the border. do they have the proper sense of urgency about an impending invasion? we are in constant touch with our ukrainian colleagues, steve and we are sharing our perspectives, context and what we are seeing both sides and sort of making sure that we all are looking at the same set of facts here. what i would tell you is from our perspective, mr. putin has a lot of combat credible capability there around the border with ukraine and in belarus, and he continues to add to it, steve. in just the recent days, he s added more and more troops to it. so, it s concerning to us and we are sharing our information with our ukrainian counterparts and we understand that they are in the neighborhood, and they are going to have a view and we respect that. we have to make sure that we are ready to bolster our nato allies in case a need to do
here. admiral, thank you. steve back to you as the news breaks. back to the admiral and sandra. sandra: admiral, we have been showing the oil statistics on this program a lot because it s worth pointing out that we are buying more oil from russia today, significantly more than we were just four years ago in 2017 in the first year of donald trump s presidency, and the first year of president biden s presidency about 218,000 barrel, 18,000 i believe in the year 2017, we have the graph, we ll put it up there. buying a significant amount more oil from russia today than we were just several years ago. does that put us in a compromising situation today, also looking at the dependency of, say, germany on russia s oil? well, look, as far as we are concerned, no, i don t believe it puts us in a compromising position, sandra. obviously again without getting ahead of economic consequences that have not been enacted, we are certainly willing to do
economy if you were to cripple russia? i think you can understand i would not get into negotiating here on live television and certainly not from the pentagon. i would refer to my state department colleagues to speak to that. i would point you to what the president himself has said, is that when it comes to economic consequences we are thinking about and considering more severe economic consequences than even those we considered in 2014, so there are much more severe consequences being considered. again, i ll let diplomats speak to that. our job at the pentagon is to be ready in case diplomacy fails. trace: admiral, stand by if you would, we want to go live to our team on the ground at kyiv, 9:00 p.m., families are settling in for another sleepless night. steve is live in the capital city with more. steve. trace, two things going on. another shipment of arms from the u.s. has arrived over the past 24 hours, part of the $200 million shipment of weapons and ammunitions for the fron