good morning, it is 11:00 a.m. eastern, i m katy tur here from new york. and i m chris jansing with special coverage on what is happening inside russia. for the first time, we are still waiting to hear from vladimir putin. now, we haven t heard anything since his former ally and the head of the ruthless mercenary wagner group attempt add revolt, and this new video released by russia, is it new or just something put out by the kremlin? who knows when it was taped. we can t say. and where is the man responsible for the dramatic weekend events, yevgeny prigozhin. right now we still don t know and he hasn t been seen since saturday when he decided to turn his forces back after marching toward the kremlin. and seemingly agreed to live in exile in belarus. so now russia, a country armed with more nuclear weapons than any other nation led by a man desperate to proclaim the old soviet union glory is at a crossroads. and while the world watches, ukraine is acting. ukrainian forces
protect himself in some way? all these questions are the kind of questions we re asking right now. the united states intelligence agencies are asking as well. anne applebaum is asking whether this is putin s czar nicholas. he has brought up what happened previously with russia. his knowledge of history notwithstanding, what do we know about and look, getting in the mind of vladimir putin, you and i have talked about this many times, is risky business, but when he s backed into a corner, what s the natural reaction? reporter: well, when he s backed into a corner, that s when he becomes the most dangerous, right? i mean, he learned that as a young kid in the streets of st. petersburg. he tells a story of being at a community apartment where he grew up and a rat was cornered and how it leaped out at him, and that was a lesson he took, right? never corner a rat because you don t know what they re going to do.
can they fight effectively? they have almost no air cover or air defense. command and control will unravel on them. probably has already. these are tougher days for ukraine. let me ask a question that may sound silly to someone steeped in military practices and history but is there any advantage to the side of the underdogfighting against where people are protesting their presence? the very existence of this aggression in ukraine. is there any diminishment in that might because there m dissent at home about what they re doing in ukraine? the russians are protesting on the streets. astonishing. that s a police state. putin murders opponents at home
you don t see any polling showing that they want a war. it is more the feeling that war is being forced on russia. but in any case, there is some protests and that it is continuing. a couple things there, jill, i mean, one is if that is the attitude among many russians, that this conflict is being forced upon them, that is a sign that russian propaganda is working with a significant portion of the population. but at the same time, we re looking at these images in st. petersburg where russian police are getting physical with these protestors. and it says to me putin cannot keep a lid on this in his own country, jill. reporter: that is true. i mean, you know, these people are very brave because over the period of actually a number of years, people have gone into the streets but the police have taken different techniques and initially they would arrest everybody. back in the 2012, pretty much,
matt, i know you have moved around as i understand the situation is changing by the hour. tell me what you have seen today and tonight. reporter: yeah, well, actually, nicole, we started the day up north in northeast in kharkiv, the second largest city in ukraine, a russian speaking majority city. we started and i was going on msnbc this morning, midnight your time, telling ayman mohyeldin how quiet and tranquil everything was, how the streets were empty, and then as i was talking, we heard very, very close bombardment, and it was really stunning, just really rapid succession bombardment that we later learned were these sort of grad style rockets, one of which landed straight into one of the streets not so far away from the center of this huge city. and then after that, we started hearing sort of the rat a tat response of these anti-aircraft weapons. so we threw on our gear and