Consider This from NPR - Ukrainians Wake Up To War

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

Russia has launched an all-out, unprovoked invasion into Ukraine, the largest attack by one state against another in Europe since World War II. There have been missile strikes throughout the country, including in the capital city, Kyiv. President Biden said this escalation means even more economic sanctions against Russia, but reiterated that U.S. forces won't fight the battle in Ukraine.NPR Correspondent Eleanor Beardsley is covering the invasion from within Ukraine. And Democratic Senator from Virginia and Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Mark Warner tells NPR's Ayesha Rascoe about what the the U.S. and its allies might do next.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In southern Ukraine, people woke up early Thursday morning to the sound of military jets flying over the city of Odessa on the shore of the Black Sea. And then, the sound of explosions. About a hundred miles to the east, in the town of Kherson, similar noises woke up Vitaly Shutov. And it's really scary because the apartment, the houses are trembling. It's very loud noises. Shutov, a 22-year-old college student, had been cooped up inside messaging with friends trying to get updates. I mean, I look at the window right now and I don't really see any people. I guess they're all in their apartments watching news.

And what they saw on the news was Russia launching an all-out, unprovoked invasion into Ukraine. There have been missile strikes throughout the country, including in Kyiv. Here's Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking from the capital city. Putin started a war against Ukraine, against the whole democratic world. He wants to destroy my country. He wants to destroy our country, everything we have been building, what we live for. Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, President Biden said this escalation means even stronger economic sanctions against Russia to, quote, maximize long-term impact.

This is going to take time. It's not going to occur. He's going to say, oh, my God, these sanctions are coming. I'm going to stand down. He's going to test the resolve of the West to see if we stay together. And we will. We will. And it will impose significant costs on him. Biden reiterated that U.S. forces won't fight the battle in Ukraine. Instead, they are stationed in Eastern European NATO countries like Poland and Germany. As I made crystal clear, the United States will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power. Back in Kherson, Vitaly Shutov was still in disbelief. I never thought that this could happen, but it did. But he insisted he is not leaving his home near the Black Sea. Everybody's staying. So we just hope and pray for the best, I'd say,

that we stand strong and we are Ukrainians and I'll never be Russian. Consider this. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the biggest attack by one state against another in Europe since World War II, and it will have consequences around the world. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, February 24th. It's Consider This from NPR. Less than a month ago, my co-host Mary Louise Kelly was in Kyiv, Ukraine, sitting in a pizza parlor with a woman named Hanna Hopko. On the walls, you could see pictures of different veterans.

Hopko was one of the original leaders of the Euromaidan protests that toppled Ukraine's government back in 2014 and ushered in a new chapter of democracy. Then she served her country as a member of parliament. We have dynamic and vibrant civil society. We have free and fair elections. In Ukraine, it's hard to predict who will become the next president in Ukraine compared to Russia, when Putin is forever. At the time, Hopko talked about a difficult conversation she was having with her 10-year-old daughter, who'd been getting good grades at school and had asked for a guinea pig.

But Hopko had to explain that with a possible invasion on the horizon, it might not be the best time. And we are like, daughter, we should wait with buying this guinea pig, Well, despite the threat, they decided to buy the pet. She is living in very challenging conditions. So she deserves to have a guinea pig. Well, evacuation is no longer a theoretical scenario. Mary Louise spoke with Hopko again Thursday after she and her family fled their home in Kyiv. My husband is with me. The guinea pig is with us. And your daughter? Daughter is in Western Ukraine. She said she assumes that as a former member of parliament, she is a clear target for the Russians.

And while Hopko is worried for her family's safety, she says this is no time for Ukrainians to be scared. Putin has to be scared because he is a little gangster with a heart full of fear. He is afraid of transatlantic unity, he is afraid of our optimistic spirit that we will win, and he will never return us back to Russian sphere of influence. What I'm really afraid of Ukrainians who already killed and who will be killed, it's not like in Russia when they don't care about people. We care about people. We care about guinea pigs, about everybody. As the invasion continues to unfold,

NPR correspondent Eleanor Beardsley has been reporting from inside Ukraine, and she spoke with my co-host Elsa Chang. So where exactly are you right now? Well, I'm in a hotel in central Ukraine, a couple hours south of Kyiv, along with a lot of families who fled the city. Tonight I heard a little boy who was going to bed and he was scared. He thought he heard planes overhead, and his mother was trying to reassure him. And she asked me, did you hear them? Tell them you didn't hear any planes. Oh, my goodness. But I understand that that's not where you were when the invasion began, right?

No, I was in Kharkiv, which is 25 miles from the Russian border. It's in the east of Ukraine. It's Ukraine's second largest city, 1.5 million people. About 5 a.m., there were explosions. It was still dark. And it came right after Putin gave the beginning of the military action. And right there, you're confronted with that decision. Do you stay or do you go? And that is a very stressful moment. And I realized that was a decision that millions of Ukrainians had to make today. So we set off about 5.30 in the morning, went about 400 miles today from east to central Ukraine. The highways were clogged, the back roads too. You know, there were a little lot of cars packed, also fancy SUVs going fast.

There were lines at gas stations. You'd go through towns and you'd see people gathered outside ATM machines getting their money out. Yeah. Well, I understand that yesterday you were reporting in the Donbass right outside the separatist regions. And I know that you were there as well eight years ago. What feels different to you this time? Right. Well, some of these towns are really close to the contact line where they've been fighting for eight years. You can't go into the separatist regions now. But when I was there eight years ago, they were becoming the separatist regions. And I remember visiting a town called Slovyansk that had just been taken over by the separatists. The town hall was barricaded with tires and all the things and sandbags everywhere, even on the inside.

And there were men with their balaclavas, their faces covered with guns. They were Russian, standing guard all over town in front of the town hall. A couple months later, the Ukrainian army took that town back. So today there were Ukrainian flags everywhere, and they had taken the linen statue down from its pedestal in front of the town hall. And I spoke with the mayor, Vadim Lach, and the town hall's been redone. No more sandbags. Here's what he told me. Here he is. He basically said that, you know,

under the separatists and living so close to the separatists, they saw the propaganda and they also, it was a horrible time when they were controlled by them. People felt threatened. They're very glad to be Ukrainian. And he said they have an action plan. People are staying calm. And I actually called him back today because I saw him yesterday, you know, after the invasion. And he said it was very sobering. He said they did not expect such a wide scale attack, that people are staying inside mostly, but they're leaving the doors to their apartment blocks open so if there's any shelling, people can run inside. Right, right. Well, with so many people on the move today, I'm just curious, like, how available are the basics? Like, is there food, water, gasoline? Tell me about that. Well, I was in a grocery store today. I wanted to get some water, but I couldn't because the

line was so long. The huge line's for gas, so I hope they're not running out. And then the hotels are filling up along the highways. People just kind of don't know where to go because so many places were attacked in the east, the south, the capital. But one thing is true. West is best, and people are heading west. It's better to be closer to Poland and the EU than to Russia. NPR correspondent Eleanor Beardsley. In his speech on Thursday afternoon, President Biden said Putin has much larger ambitions than Ukraine. Putin's actions betray his sinister vision for the future of our world. One where nations take what they want by force. But it is a vision that the

United States and freedom-loving nations everywhere will oppose with every tool of our considerable power. To discuss what the U.S. and its allies' next moves might be, NPR's Ayesha Roscoe spoke with Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior U.S. defense official has said that Russian forces are moving to take control of Kyiv, decapitating the government there and installing a puppet government. Do you have solid evidence that that's what Putin will do? On this issue, the American intelligence community has been basically 100 percent right, literally for months. They have said repeatedly that this was not going to be an

action only in the east, that Russia was going to come in from a variety of regions. You put 190,000 troops on the Ukrainian border. They hope to decapitate the government and in their terms, Putin's terms, demilitarize Ukraine. That is an action that goes well beyond some actions in the East. I do think the American intelligence, along with the British and NATO allies, have done a good job of, in a sense, as we get intelligence, putting it out to the public, which is not the traditional way. And that's taken away Putin's any ability for him to have what's called a false flag, where somehow this was the Ukrainians' fault. We pointed out a couple weeks ago that if there was a coup, it was actually Russians. If you saw a video, it would be actually Russians.

When the leaders in the East said they needed to have people come to the defenses of the separatist republics, we showed that those were filmed days before. I also think the intelligence has helped move our NATO allies, some of which even a few months ago were reluctant to believe this, to where we're now united. I wish and pray, I just was in Munich last week, where there was an international security conference where this was a major topic, that the Ukrainian government itself would have taken the intelligence more seriously

and called up their reserves, fully mobilized their forces. I'm not sure it would still stop the Russians from being successful militarily, but it's one thing for the Russians to overrun the government or overrun the military. As your last report just indicated, Ukrainian people are proud to be Ukrainian. They don't want to be controlled by Russia. And we've seen the images of Ukrainians training on the weekends for an insurgency. It's, again, one thing to knock out a government. It's another thing to fight an insurgency led by the Ukrainian people across all of this captured territory. Following up on what you said about the intelligence,

the U.S. is taking a different approach, openly using intelligence about what Russia might do next. But that did not stop Putin from invading Ukraine. What did releasing that intelligence really accomplish? It accomplished two things. I believe it threw him off from being able to make any kind of claim that this is somehow instigated by the Ukrainians. If they'd put a coup together, if they'd put videos out, that whole effort of what's called a false flag was totally undermined, number one. Number two, it also made our NATO allies, some of which as recently as last week, that we're still not

believing that Putin would go in this big. They have all come around. We now have not only America and NATO, we have countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, all weighing in with sanctions as well. Matter of fact, the only person that I've heard that's come to Putin's defense in the last 72 hours has been the former president of the United States, which is pretty stunning in my mind. And here in our own politics in America, I was very proud of former President Bush, and the vast majority of the men and women I work with in the U.S. Senate, doesn't matter whether Democrats or Republicans, are saying, we're going to stand with the people of Ukraine, we're going to protect NATO,

and we're going to make sure that Putin pays a price with the most draconian sanctions ever. Do you have any information regarding the safety of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky? I have no information about the whereabouts or immediate safety of President Zelensky. I do know, though, that one of the most important things that we've got to maintain, and this is where we get into the cyber domain, that the images that the Ukrainians are filming or your reporters or others are getting out of Ukraine right now, we've got to make sure that the world sees this kind of aggression. I hope that some of these images may even be able to penetrate into Russia,

because I don't think the vast majority of the Russian people want to have this kind of unprovoked war against Ukraine. And that's where I'm fearful that in the short term, if the Russians launch a more major cyber attack against Ukraine, where they try to take down the internet, and if they try to, for example, turn off all the power and the water, when you launch cyber attacks, they don't recognize geographic boundaries. Some of that cyber attack could actually start shutting down systems in eastern Poland where we have American NATO troops, where we have, if you shut down Polish hospitals because they can't get power to take care of their people, you're rapidly approaching what could be viewed as an

Article 5 violation of NATO, which basically says if you attack one NATO nation and Poland is a NATO nation, all of the remaining 29 nations need to come to their assistance. So we're in an uncharted territory. Should the U.S. ramp up weapons shipments to Ukraine if there is an insurgency? We need to stand with the Ukrainian people in the insurgency. How we do that in concert with our allies is best not talked about on radio or TV at this point. Because, again, we don't want to get engaged in what becomes a NATO-Russia direct confrontation. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.