intelligence, air superiority, so for now the u.s. officials are fairly confident that because the russians have not been successfully interfering with those convoys with those shipments that they are getting into the right hands here. but, of course, a u.s. official did tell cnn last night that that could change, that they re concerned that the russians could actually ramp up their attacks on these convoys as they try to impact the ukrainians ability to fight off this new offensive in the donbas effectively. so what we re seeing now is u.s. officials are just monitoring this, they say that it is not science, tracking these weapons over the border, but they do realize that the risk here of not arming ukrainians properly is much higher than the risk of these weapons perhaps falling into the wrong happeneds. especially now as barbara mentioned we re entering this new phase of the war, tank on tank battle, scenes reminiscent from world war ii. thank you. i want to bring in our jim
actively intercepting the shipments, those convoys, which is very interesting to u.s. officials that we have spoken to. they do not understand why they haven t made more of a concerted effort by russia to intercept the shipments. the big reason could be russia does not have air superiority, control over parts of western ukraine where the shipments are coming in. a u.s. official did tell cnn last night they expect russia to start making more of an effort to intercept those. u.s. officials are acknowledging to us they do not know exactly where all the weapons are going once they do do in. i want to read a quote that underscores what they say. the u.s. lacks visibility into this question. one saying, we have fidelity for a short time. but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero. it drops into a big black hole and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period
political brinkmannship. october 17th is not the drop dead date. there are no payments due for a couple weeks. now, the white house has a different view on that. and we may be hear something of that from president obama and treasury secretary jack lew who are scheduled to meet later today. while the white house has been inhad thing that the treasury department may go into a process they call here in washington a prioritization, picking and choosing which bills to pay. a senior administration official did tell cnn last night they are hopeful if a senate deal starts to come into shape and it appears that the house will take a loaning at it and pass it, get it to the president or if that happens in the reverse order, that perhaps they won t have to go into that process and they re hoping that the markets will remain calm during all of that unfolding. but of course, kate, there is a long way to go. we started out with a lot of hope yesterday and it didn t end