Summary
We are 12 days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the humanitarian toll is escalating by the day. Just yesterday, four people including a mother and her two children were killed by Russian mortar strike while trying to evacuate. Yesterday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the U.S. is talking with its European allies about banning all imports of Russian oil in what would be a devastating blow to the Russian economy. Ukraine`s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urges global boycott of Russian products.
Transcript
JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: And that is tonight`s REIDOUT. "ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES" starts right now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voiceover): Tonight on ALL IN, civilians under attack in Ukraine.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They`re shooting at schools, on hospitals, they shooting everywhere all the time for the last three days.
HAYES: The desperate attempt to flee the Russian bombardment and the growing refugee crisis in Ukraine. Then --
JOHN KIRBY, SPOKESMAN, PENTAGON: They are having morale problems. They are having supply problems. They are having fuel problems. They`re having food problems,
HAYES: Exactly where the Russian army is right now as they move to encircle Kyiv. Plus thousands of Russians arrested while protesting the war.
Tonight, the cost of dissent in Russia and the cost of relying on corrupt regimes for energy.
JEN PSAKI, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: It`s in everyone`s interest to reduce the impact on the global oil marketplace.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
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HAYES (on camera): Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. We are 12 days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the humanitarian toll is escalating by the day. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military seemed to be doing everything in their power to make it worse.
After plainly failing to achieve their tactical objectives early in the invasion, they wanted a kind of lightning strike role into Kyiv take over the country, the Russian military has escalated its attacks on civilians. A senior U.S. defense official said there has been an increase in rocket artillery and missile attacks and those strikes are hitting civilian infrastructure and residential areas.
One area that has been especially hard hit is the city of Irpin just northwest of Kyiv. Its civilian population has been relentlessly bombarded over the past few days. And as NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel reports, escaping the city has become extremely perilous.
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RICHARD ENGEL, NBC NEWS CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: The Ukrainians blew up this bridge in order to slow down the Russian advance. But it has also made it extremely difficult for people to evacuate these areas that are hotly contested as Russian forces trying to consolidate their positions and the Ukrainians try to keep them on that side of the river.
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HAYES: Sky News was also an Irpin and they report the Russian military seems to be actively targeting civilians trying to escape. I want to warn you before you show this that some of this footage we`re about to play for you is very, very intense.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They were running for their lives frantically trying to keep their families together amid the mayhem and gunfire, desperately handing over their toddlers to soldiers and strangers, scrambling to get away from the firing and shelling even as they fled.
Many has spent days under fire, trapped in their homes until they realized it was run or die with the Russians getting closer.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) Russian soldiers, they`re killing people.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Irpin on the outskirts of the capital is being relentlessly shelled. And there`s no escape, not even for the civilians you can see at the top of your picture running with their cases to getaway.
This is an entirely residential area. Two children and their mother were killed outright. But this area is filled with families utterly powerless against these attacking armies.
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HAYES: Just yesterday, four people including a mother and her two children were killed by Russian mortar strike while trying to evacuate. A photojournalist captured an image of them and I want to warn you this picture is very graphic.
The mayor of European confirmed that two children two adults were killed by the strike. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke about the family saying, "How many families have died like this in Ukraine? We won`t forgive." The United Nations says more than one and a half million Ukrainians have already fled the country. There have been over 1000 civilian casualties including 351 people killed in fighting.
Early this morning, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed to offer a ceasefire, proposing some humanitarian corridors for civilians to evacuate. Ukrainian officials whoever said Russia was shelling during the proposed ceasefire which prevented evacuation. Ukraine also rejected the proposed corridors because four of the six corridors would have had Ukrainians evacuate to Russia, or its northern ally Belarus.
Earlier today, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said he will not meet Vladimir Putin`s three demands. They are that Ukraine not join NATO, that Crimea remain part of Russia, and that the two breakaway regions that Putin scooped up in Ukraine would get to be independent.
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In a video Zelenskyy released earlier this morning filmed on his phone. Ukrainian president showed that he is still in his offices in Kyiv, saying he is "Not hiding and not afraid of anyone." And while the administration`s continuing to apply pressure to Putin while trying not to escalate the conflict, yesterday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the U.S. is talking with its European allies about banning all imports of Russian oil in what would be a devastating blow to the Russian economy.
Blinken also said NATO members have a green light to send fighter jets to Ukraine to support Ukrainian Air Force that is still flying. The Ukrainian military has been able to strike the Russian convoy heading to Kyiv and slow its progress, but the Russian army has continued to make progress as it inches closer to the Ukrainian capital.
Oleksandr Akymenko is an independent journalist and educator who co-founded the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program at Stanford University. He joins me live now from Western Ukraine. Alexander, thank you so much for your time. Can you tell us what conditions are there like there where you are?
OLEKSANDR AKYMENKO, INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST: Hi, Chris! Thank you for having me, first of all. And I would say that the western regions are much more calm than Kyiv area and also south of the country and east of the country where Russian shelling is tremendous. So, this people just -- I mean, the Russian army is behaving like Nazis. They are committing crime crimes against humanity.
And if Nazis had this concentration of camps, this army has concentration of cities. They just block several cities and not allowing people to get out of the danger. They are sitting there without heat, without electricity, without water, without any hope for help, because Russian side doesn`t really allow people to use this green corridors.
And nothing helps. Negotiation doesn`t help. And the promises just failing one after another. So, it`s really really critical situation in several Ukrainian cities where people are just in captivity. They are just hostages there. It`s a terror.
HAYES: There are so many fleeing of course. And as you look at the pictures, it`s very clear why. I mean, this is just -- appears to be indiscriminate use of weapons of war on plainly civilian areas. We`ve seen picture after picture of that.
And as people flee West, I wonder how able the infrastructure of the Ukrainian state from electricity to internet, to transportation is holding up and receiving those people, getting them to safety.
AKYMENKO: You know, it`s also very critical situation with the -- with the ability of West to accommodate all of the people because there are so many refugees right now in the western part of Ukraine. Today, the mayor of one of the biggest cities in Ukraine, Lviv city, Andriy Sadovyi, told that the capacity of the city is almost reached.
So, like, more than I believe one and a half million people crossed the Polish border during this 11 days of Russian invasion and what they call a special operation, but that actually it`s cruel war against Ukrainian people that the Russians are committing right now.
HAYES: Oleksandr Akymenko, I know that you`re in a very parallel situation. And I wish you all the best. Thank you so much and stay safe.
AKYMENKO: Thank you, Chris.
HAYES: Clint Watts is an MSNBC National Security Analyst, a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He has been tracking Russian military movement into Ukraine. And he joins me now.
Clint, where is the Russian army so far? How much progress have they made in their aim to essentially overrun the country?
CLINT WATTS, MSNBC NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: So, Chris, in week one, we were talking about Russian struggles and I`d like to start there. But in week two, we`ve also seen them make progress. Here is Kyiv. This is where Richard Engel was reporting from. This is that Irpin area generally where you`re seeing these Russian armored convoys still trying to plow through and being torn up by Ukrainian dismounted infantry, using anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, literally bogging down these convoys in this area.
Every time those combos get bogged down, you saw that bridge was blown, they create splits in the lines. It makes logistics almost impossible to do. Separately, when you zoom out from this area, what you`re seeing though is the Russian military slowly advancing in on multiple corridors. And once they get to this point, they`re going to try and encircle Kyiv, essentially bring a siege to that town. That would look, I imagine, a lot like what we see down here in Mariupol`. That was that footage, the awful footage of the woman and her children that was killed.
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Separately, what`s been interesting is the Russians have gone and used indirect fires to bomb all of these towns, but they`re not securing them. They`re bypassing. Which means that in their rear area, they haven`t secured those areas, the logistical lines keep getting attacked. Meaning they can`t keep advancing. They`re constantly stymied.
Even more interesting, this Kharkiv. Kharkiv has been the site of major bombardments right here. You`ve seen a lot of air war taking place. Just in the last few hours and yesterday, we heard reports that here the Ukrainians were again contesting. This isn`t that far from the Russian border. So, it`s remarkable that they`re able to do this now almost two weeks into the battle.
Separately, though, I think we got to talk about where the Russians have had more success, which is down here where they already controlled. In the beginning of the war, they launched out of Crimea and created this landbridge here to Mariupol. They`re closing in from the Russian side, and they control Donbas. This Mariupol area is one of those humanitarian disasters where you saw the Russians order, essentially offer a humanitarian corridor, yet they still continue to shell civilians.
This is where I want to bring it to today, which is where they have had success is coming out of Crimea, and essentially advancing West. What you see them doing is trying to move all the way towards Moldova. Thursday, we were talking about Kherson. They took a bridge over. It moved to Mykolaiv.
But here they`ve gotten bogged down again. Essentially, Ukrainians have come back and claimed some of that territory. They come back into that town, and you`ve even seen protests in Kherson. So, again, Russia advancing having more success with what seems to be a much better armor unit, but also getting bogged down in the rear area.
The last point that I think is critical for us to watch is Putin and his forces when advanced all the way to this breakaway separatists area known as Transnistria. Transnistria is an ethnic Russian population that`s basically right along this border area. And if they can take that, their Russian peacekeepers, otherwise known as an assault force there, they can link up with. And this would cut off the southern area.
Vladimir Putin for, over a decade now, he`s been talking about Novorossiya, or new Russia, about unifying the Russian people on the southern end of Ukraine. That would seal them off across the Black Sea, take Odesa, which is really the financial sort of center, the industrial center.
And here, just remember this, this is the wheat fields of southern Ukraine. This is a super important area, not just for Ukraine but for global wheat supply. They`re not going to plant this year. So, when that happens, we should be looking at how this will affect not just the Ukrainian economy or the Russian economy, but all of our economies around the world.
HAYES: Yes, Odesa, one of the great cities in the world actually. I was just reading an incredible book about its incredibly rich history. In terms of this advance, I mean, we`ve seen a lot of reporting about the flaws and problems of the Russian assault. What do you make of that now 12 days in?
I mean, has that been overdone? Are they are they kind of correcting those problems? Are they -- I mean, it looks like the convoy still stalled. It`s it looks like they still have fuel and supply problems. It looks like particularly in the north, they are still not where they thought they were going to be.
WATTS: That`s right, Chris. They advanced but they don`t secure. And this I think really speaks volumes to the problem for Russia over time. If you can`t secure your rear area, you can`t resupply yourself, and you can`t sustain that over time. Invasions, we know this, Chris, are easy. Occupation is extremely hard.
The U.S. military, we went through this all through the global war on terror. This is trouble for Putin. Not only is he lost just catastrophic amounts of soldiers up into the thousands, military hardware and equipment, he does not control the air. This will come down to fuel, food, and manpower and ammunition.
And what you`re seeing the Russians do, they`re pouring all this combat power in. Separately though, you`re seeing the West start to show up. We`ve got anti-tank, anti-aircraft missiles coming in. We now have foreign fighters drifting into this area and humanitarian aid. This is a real big problem, I think, for Vladimir Putin over time.
HAYES: All right, Clint Watts, thank you. That was -- that was helpful to just see everything there on the map there like that. I appreciate it.
Ben Rhodes is a former deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, and he joins me now. And Ben, maybe sort of segueing off this, I mean, I think that, you know, Zelenskyy has been clear about this, right, that a full military victory over the Russian army, in some definitive sense is essentially not really on the table.
What`s on the table is creating costs to this reckless, insane war that Putin has started such that he rethinks them. What progress do you see on that front in terms of the coordinated interaction response?
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BEN RHODES, FORMER DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Well, I think right now we see a circumstance where Putin is not going to be able to achieve what would have been his political objective which was a rapid decapitation of the Ukrainian government, an effort to kind of install a Russian backed puppet government in Kyiv as he`s done in some of the other kind of breakaway separatist regions that Russia has claimed over the years.
And essentially, he could pull most of his forces back and try to rule Ukraine through intimidation, corruption. That`s clearly not going to happen. And so, as Clint was saying, Putin does not have an end game other than occupation, given that Ukrainians are clearly not going to submit to his rule. And occupation doesn`t seem like it can work in the long run given the kinds of resistance we`re seeing from Ukrainians, given the weapons that are pouring into them.
On the other side of that coin, though, the Ukrainians don`t have the power to drive the Russian military out of Ukraine clearly. And so, therefore, unfortunately, where the direction of events is going right now is a really long and brutal and bloody struggle for the future of Ukraine that Putin doesn`t have an obvious capacity to win. But given his mindset, and given everything we know about him, it feels very unlikely that he would accept a face-saving withdraw in that context.
HAYES: You know, the one obvious remaining tool in the arsenal of the West, the E.U., and NATO in the U.S. is oil, right? And that was sort of hived off from the sanctions in the first round partly as sort of mutual self- interest. The Russians need to sell it, the Europeans need to buy it, particularly natural gas.
This is the Germany`s new chancellor Scholz rejecting a ban today saying Europe has deliberately exempted energy supplies from Russia from sanctions. At the moment, Europe supply of energy for heat generation, mobility, power supply and industry cannot be secured in any other way. It is therefore of essential importance for the provision of public services and the daily lives of our citizens.
How important do you think this is? How much do you imagine the Biden administration is working on this? They have their own misgivings, I think, as well.
RHODES: Yes, now, look, this is the sanction. It was always going to have the biggest impact on the economies of Europe and the United States. Even more so, Europe that gets 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia. I think there are a number of problems, though, for Western leaders who are resistant to these sanctions at this point.
Number one, you saw when the sanctions were imposed on the central bank and the SWIFT system, the exceptions that were carved out are essentially exceptions to facilitate payment to Russia for this oil and gas.
There`s a moral issue, Chris, about whether or not we can be making significant payments to Russia, revenue that they`re going to turn around and pour into their war machine. I think that that is increasingly untenable position for Western governments. It`s also the case that public opinion in these countries is significantly in favor of doing more.
Now, of course, when that shows up in high gas prices and high home heating prices, you know, you may see some give there. But thus far public opinion has really risen to this moment in the West. And look, the reality is if we`re in for what we described, which is a potentially long term conflict between the West and Russia, and above all the Ukrainian people in Russia.
The capacity to deny them the basic revenue that fuels their war machine, that fuels their supply chain, that fuels their capacity to kind of rearm that is going to matter. And Russia can make back some of those oil sells by, you know, selling things on a discount to China, but it`s not going to be what they`re making now.
HAYES: All right, Ben Rhodes, thank you. A quick correction on something Clint said that were just misspoke. That those children and women that were shot and killed in the street, that was in Irpin and not Mariupol.
All right, when we come back, as the horrors unfold in Ukraine, the U.N. estimates at 1.7 million citizens have fled their lives. Next, my interview with a member of the Ukrainian parliament who`s traveled to the U.S. to make an appeal for her country in person as Putin`s war on our homeland wages on. We`ll be right back.
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ALEX CRAWFORD, REPORTER, SKY NEWS: They know all about civilians being attacked here. The small village community just south of the Ukrainian capital has been torn apart by Russian bombs. Almost an entire street disappeared in an instant. Three children and three adults were killed, devastating their families and the whole neighborhood.
The explosions have left a deep burning anger and a thirst for revenge amongst the men of the village who`ve taken up arms to defend their community and their country.
I feel only hate, he tells us. We will never ever forgive them for this.
Another says they have to close the skies. The rest of the world have to become involved and close the airspace above Ukraine.
And their friend says, we`ll keep on shooting them. Every time they shoot us, we`ll shoot back and we won`t leave any alive. We`re going to kill every single invader.
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HAYES: That was Sky News reporter Alex Crawford reporting from the village of Vasylkiv, about 21 miles southwest of Kyiv. That`s about as far away as the capital is from Dulles International Airport. Russian forces utterly destroyed entire sections of the village as they press north towards Ukraine`s capital.
Oleksandra Ustinova is a member of the Ukrainian parliament. She is here in the U.S. lobbying members of Congress to do more to help civilians in Ukraine. And she joins me now.
First of all, let`s start on the humanitarian front, and then we`ll move to the military from. What can Western nations, NATO, the U.S., and E.U. do to help Ukraine`s people particularly those who are fleeing?
OLEKSANDRA USTINOVA, MEMBER VERKHOVNA RADA: So, let`s be honest. The first and the most important thing that Ukrainians need right now, besides closing the sky that actually causes this humanitarian catastrophe because people are literally shot to death and shelled to death, is the enforcement of the humanitarian safe corridors.
We have about 400,000 people right now stuck in Mariupol City which is probably half the size of Washington D.C. They`re encircled by the Russian army and they do not let even children and women out of the city. These people do not have any electricity, heat, or even food, so they`re starving.
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The same situation we have in the suburbs of Kyiv. There is, for example, an orphanage with about -- with 0 children who are -- some of them are handicapped unfortunately. Some of them have other mental issues. And they do not let our army or our volunteers even to get them out.
The volunteers could try to get through with food just to feed people were shot to death. So, it is very important right now that one of the countries step in and does the enforcement of the human -- safe corridors for humans, because otherwise this people will literally starve to death.
HAYES: What would that look like when you say enforcement? Like what is it -- I mean, it seems to me that there has to be, you know, a negotiated situation where Russia agrees to a ceasefire. Clearly, they haven`t done that. I know, they -- your government has said they violated those in the future. But when you say enforce it, what do you mean by that?
USTINOVA: It means that one of the countries steps in and negotiates with Russia, that they will provide the safe corridor. So far, Russia`s proposal is on the Belarus which can hardly be considered an independent country.
HAYES: Of course.
USTINOVA: And since we have so many people already been shot, that there is no trust. So, we had been asking Turkey, we had been asking the European countries to step in and be one of those partners who can actually demand from Russia to do the safe corridors for at least children and kids.
Also, one of the -- one of the other suggestions that had been made so far is the humanitarian aid airlift, which means there are some parts of the skies that have been controlled by one of the countries. And that means that any airplane going in and shooting one of the buses or any columns that are trying to get out of the cities would be shut down.
Those are a few things that we keep asking just to protect people. And we are talking about civilians. We`re talking about women and children, because we are trying to get them at least now out of the occupied cities.
HAYES: Final question for you. People say a no fly zone would precipitate an armed -- a war between the U.S. and Russia, you know, which could become -- which will be between two nuclear powers. It would need -- you would need to shut down -- shoot down Russian planes. What do you say to people say that`s absolutely a no go?
USTINOVA: I will tell them that 20 years ago, Ukraine gave up our nuclear weapons. And we were promised if there is any threat to our sovereignty and to our independence, that one of the countries like Russia, unfortunately, United Kingdom, and the United States will step in and protect.
Now, when I can hear -- when I keep hearing that if the NATO country is invaded, then we will step in and let`s say implement a no fly zone. We had been given the same promises 20 years ago. And now the world is watching an execution of Ukrainian children, women, civilians around the world 24/7 and it`s not doing anything about it.
So, I just keep asking, where`s the red line? How many people have to die so that the West keeps its promise in thus step in? We also keep asking if you don`t want to do the fly zone just, give us the air defense system like an Iron Dome that the Israel has. So we can shoot the missiles and the shells on our own, so they don`t reach the civilian areas, the residential areas, our orphanages, and our hospitals.
HAYES: Oleksandra Ustinova, thank you very much for making time tonight. I appreciate it.
Tonight, major developments in the push to get off Russian oil as President Biden turns to other sources. Why the global dependence on fossil fuels keeps getting us in these situations? I`ll explain right after this.
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ENGEL: Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has strongly criticized President Biden and the West for not placing sanctions on Russia sooner to try to prevent the invasion. In a speech today, Zelenskyy again pleaded for a ban on the sale of Russian oil.
Meanwhile, a senior US defense official tonight says nearly 100 percent of Russia`s troops that were on the Ukrainian border are now inside the country. Though they continue to meet Ukrainian resistance even in areas Russia now controls. Ukrainians lying down in front of Russian and vehicles, even riding on top of one waving a Ukrainian flag.
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HAYES: As Richard Engel reported for NBC News tonight, Ukraine`s president is urging the rest of the world to ban Russia`s main export, fossil fuel. And as oil and gas prices soar in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, there has been a push here to explore other opportunities for energy imports.
There are reports that President Joe Biden is considering a trip to Saudi Arabia to convinced them to produce more oil, also talks about new Iran deal to normalize relations with that oil rich country. And over the weekend, administration officials visited Venezuela, a Russian ally with massive petroleum resources to possibly reduce sanctions on its oil exports.
[20:35:01]
And if all this sounds familiar, it is because it is. The United States and much of the world in fact has been relying on a coalition of often rogue petrol states to fuel our need for oil production for decades, even as every U.S. president from both parties since Richard Nixon has been calling for us to reduce our reliance on foreign energy.
Back in the early 1970s, then-President Nixon lifted caps on oil imports into the United States. He did this because our domestic supply struggled to meet the demand of the post-World War II boom. And just as he did that, OPEC, which was then the newly formed Middle East oil cartel, embargoed oil imports the U.S. and other countries over their support for Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war.
The embargo was massively disruptive to American life. Cars waiting in long lines during the gas shortage. Gas stations forced to ration sales proving for the first time just how dangerous our reliance on foreign energy could be. Nearly 50 years ago, 50 years ago, in the middle of that embargo, Nixon pledged to end our reliance on foreign oil.
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RICHARD NIXON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We as a nation must now set upon a new course. We must develop new sources of energy which will give us the capacity to meet our needs without relying on any foreign nation.
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HAYES: Just few years later, in 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected president. And one of his first addresses to the American public, he called for reduction energy consumption, only for another energy crisis to pop up two years later in Iranian Revolution 1979, leading again to long gas lines and rations.
That same year, Carter installed solar panels. The White House wisely noting that renewable energy would not only be better for the environment, it would also reduce the influence of oil rich countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
JIMMY CARTER, FORMER PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES: Solar energy will not pollute our air or water. We will not run short of it. No one can ever embargo the sun interrupt its deliver it to us.
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HAYES: He was right nearly 50 years ago, even if the solar panels were mostly symbolic. But for a moment, it really looked like the U.S. is going to combat the oil shocks in the 1970s with huge investments in renewable energy. But in the following year, President Ronald Reagan had different plants.
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RONALD REAGAN, FORMER PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES: America must get to work producing more energy. Large amounts of oil and natural gas lay beneath our land and off our shores untouched because the present administration seems to believe the American people would rather see more regulation, more taxes, and more controls than more energy.
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HAYES: Once he took office, Reagan quietly removed the solar panels from the White House even as he too called for reduced reliance on foreign energy. And from that point onwards, it was a similar holding pattern for every president starting with President George HW Bush when the Gulf War started, all the way to Donald Trump.
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GEORGE HW BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES: There is no security for the United States in further dependence on foreign oil.
BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES: This will reduce our demand for foreign oil.
GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES: That`s what I want to talk to you all about today, a strategy to make us less dependent on foreign sources of energy.
BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil.
DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We are independent and we do not need Middle East oil.
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HAYES: Of course, that last one was false. Now, it`s the same story for nearly 50 years. And I`m going to talk to one senator who just spoke to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy about how the U.S. can finally break that cycle of reliance on foreign oil including from Russia next.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ukraine`s former President Petro Poroshenko has been busy rallying volunteer fighters and soldiers. He`s among a growing list of people demanding safe passage for civilians.
PETRO POROSHENKO, FORMER PRESIDENT, UKRAINE: We will be in with or without Western assistance. Because you see how strong is Ukraine. But it takes significantly more time and will need significantly more lives and blood.
And this is just the decision from our partners on the west. Do you ready to give us the weapons? Do you ready to increase the sanction? Do you ready to do all of this to minimize Ukrainian blood and Ukrainian lives? Please do that immediately.
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HAYES: Amid increased calls for sanctions from Ukrainians on the front line, U.S. lawmakers are moving ahead with a proposal to ban imports of Russian oil even as our allies in Europe were much more reliant on fuel from Russia particularly gas remain unwilling to do so.
But as the national conversation once again returns the various bad actors the U.S. must deal with as part of our decades-long addiction to foreign oil imports, some of the usual suspects are calling on the U.S. to double down on its own production of fossil fuels instead of transitioning to a green economy.
Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia demanding U.S. "ramp up domestic energy production, increase access to our abundant resources." And Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accusing the Biden ministration of "a holy war against our own American energy production." It is worth asking after nearly half a century of this kind of thing why we don`t actually look for a sustainable alternative.
Senator Jeff Merkley is a Democrat from Oregon. He participated in a bipartisan Zoom call with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy over the weekend. He`s a strong supporter of our efforts to get off of reliance on fossil fuels.
Senator, I think that what we`re seeing right now gives lies of this whole notion, 50 years of increasing U.S. domestic production. It`s not a question of where the actual stuff comes from. Its fossil fuels price on a global market subject to these kinds of things. This idea that we can drill our way out of this has been proven to be madness. Do your colleagues understand this?
SEN. JEFF MERKLEY (D-OR): As long as there is a world market for oil, Russia will be able to sell it to them. And so, unfortunately not all my colleagues yet understand that the way to undercut the power of Russia is to end our dependence on oil and have the world transition to renewable energy.
[20:45:15]
And I was very struck by that 50 years of history you had. But back in the days of President Carter, there were two things that we didn`t know at that point. One, was that tremendous climate impacts of burning fossil fuels. And the second is renewable energy was very expensive at that time as compared to fossil fuels.
Now, it`s cheaper. So, we have every reason to pivot quickly. We should be having a national American solar program. We should have a climate emergency. We should be transitioning to offshore wind, and we should be doing it in partnership and leading the world in this effort to end this addiction to oil, this damage to the climate, and the enrichment of people like Putin.
HAYES: Yes, I mean that your point about the technology and the feasibility now as compared to 50 years are really important. In fact, today we`re seeing the E.U. tried to sort of propose this crash course to sort of get off the natural gas. And the plan, which will be presented on Tuesday, will propose steps such as tapping new gas supplies, increasing energy efficiency already this year and aims to deliver independence to the region`s biggest supplier of the fossil fuel well before 2030, sooner than previous projections.
But again, all this stuff takes time and we should have started long ago. But we do have an advantage now from a technological standpoint.
MERKLEY: I was thinking back to the conversations I had at the Munich Security Conference years ago and at the Paris conference, why is Europe doubling down on fossil gas? Because they know how damaging that is. They said they`re committed to renewable energy. And not only fossil gas, but dependence on Russia.
And Germany had a theory. They had a theory that if Russia depended on Europe for this big supply of money for the sale of its gas, that Russia would always behave itself. Well, certainly what`s happening right now in Ukraine has shattered that assumption. And we see Germany really changing their thinking very quickly.
Germany also had a plan to close a bunch of -- shutter a bunch of their nuclear plants which provided a lot of power, which seems to me in the wake of this, I mean, it`s the largest source of carbon-free power on the earth. Like, I think the verdict on that is that is that was a mistake. Do you agree?
MERKLEY: I do. I do agree. And the Green Party had always recognized the downsides of nuclear energy, the concern about where you store the waste, the possibility of a Chernobyl incident and meltdown, and those are real issues. But the Green Party is about saving the planet. And to save the planet right now, substituting gas for nuclear energy at safe, well- established facilities is a mistake.
HAYES: All right, Jeff Merkley, senator from Oregon, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Next, the protests in Russia are growing, so are the totalitarian crackdowns in the streets. This weekend, thousands are arrested in demonstrations across the country. The man who wrote the book on Vladimir Putin`s propaganda machine after this.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Putin says he`s not attacking civilians. What would you say to that?
They`re shelling civilians directly, she tells us, not any military place or object. They`re shooting at schools, on hospitals. They`re shooting everywhere all the time for the last three days.
That`s what they`ve come from.
They show us the damage done to their home and the residential buildings around them and in their street.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When we got out of our home, I saw five, six shells maybe. Every building was destroyed.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The stream of people fleeing are traumatized, but many roles are angry and full of despair.
Putin is a war criminal, she says, the anti-Christ. You`ve been waiting for him. Now, you`ve got him.
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HAYES: Ukrainians under attack in the Russian army blaming the same person that thousands of Russians blamed for this war, Vladimir Putin. More than 4600 Russian protesters were arrested just yesterday in at least 65 cities across Russia. That`s according to the human rights monitoring group OBD Info, which estimates more than 13,000 Russians have been arrested since the invasion began.
It has been getting increasingly difficult to cover these protests because the Russian state is blocking access to major foreign news outlets. And President Vladimir Putin just signed a law that makes it criminal for journalists to even call the invasion of Ukraine a war.
Peter Pomerantsev has been covering this dystopian reality of life in Russia for years, writing several books on the spread of Russian disinformation at home and abroad. He`s now a senior fellow studying Disinformation and Propaganda at Johns Hopkins University. And he joins me now.
Peter, first, I wonder if you could talk about what you see as the significance to a place that already didn`t really have a much of a free press being cracked down on so heavily in just the last few weeks.
PETER POMERANTSEV, SENIOR FELLOW, AGORA INSTITUTE AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY: Well, it didn`t have a much for free press, but it still wasn`t like a Cold War system. You had Internet access to anything you wanted if you were ready to search for it. And that was a small group of very plucky, very brave, independent media.
Now, that`s gone. And it`s apart from everything else, a sign from the Kremlin that we`ve gone from being this kind of like authoritarian regime to full-on Stalin 2.0. It`s also like a signal. It`s not just about controlling information, it`s about telling the population we really mean it, we`re really angry and we know no boundaries anymore.
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HAYES: What do you think the information environment in Russia is now? I mean, it must -- obviously, it`s been criminalized to even call it a war. They`ve cut off access to information outside official channels. And yet, you know, if you`re a Russian pensioner, you realize that the rubles devaluing or that you can`t use Apple Pay anymore, whatever it is, you got to be -- I wonder what the -- what sort of mass opinion is like in that context?
POMERANTSEV: Look, it`s in a huge amount of flux. And any sociology that we would try to do now would give you a picture that would change in two days` time. But there`s a very famous Russian kind of phrase called we`re pulled between the television and the fridge.
So, the television is all this sort of like, very -- you know, let`s call it what it is, Nazi-style propaganda. And then there`s the fridge, which is telling you hold on, life is getting worse. Something is wrong here. And what we`re going to see play out over the next few weeks, actually, is this tension between the television and the fridge.
HAYES: That`s a really useful. I mean, the question becomes how people chalk up what`s happening the fridge, right, in their economic circumstances and whether Putin is able to sort of wield that to his benefit. It does strike me today in the address he gave, a truly surreal and bizarre International Women`s Day address in which he assured people that there no army -- further army reservists would be called up for the war, or special operations as he calls it, which suggests to me there is some weariness at least on his part about the cost of this, right? That that`s a -- that`s an assurance that tips his hand a little bit, that he is thinking a little bit about that. It`s in his head a little bit about how the Russian people are reacting to this.
POMERANTSEV: Yes, it`s a very weird system. Look, clearly it`s not a democracy. There`s no elections he has to think about. But it`s always important for him to know that public opinion is sort of going along with him more or less, largely, because if there`s a big gap between him and public opinion, that encourages the people in the elites who wants to get rid of him.
Putin`s great fear is not NATO and all this, and the West, which are abstract things. The real fear, any Russian leader from Ivan the Terrible on is the palace coup. And any Russian leader has to kind of, even as he represses the nation, sort of make sure that it`s going along with him, whether through fear or love.
HAYES: Yes, these protests -- were showing footage of them now. I have to say that I am just so struck by the bravery of folks and people that are speaking out about this at any level of society. I mean, what are they facing? What does it mean for people to be doing this?
POMERANTSEV: Well, they`re facing 15 years, 15 years in prison, beatings, lots of work, I mean, huge risks. So, these are just the people coming out. I mean, the sociology that pops up shows actually a lot of people very unhappy, or at least very confused by this war.
So, these are the really brave people. There`s a lot more people who are kind of passively resisting, but it`s very hard to find a way to articulate that.
HAYES: There`s also a foreign component, of course, to Russian propaganda. And that really feels like it has fallen flat, partly, I think, because just the clear crimes being committed. But, you know, we saw in Syria, you know, targeting of civilian structures, mass death, and mayhem, and carnage being caused by Russian forces, or the forces that were devising and aiding, and a fairly successful attempt outside of Syria to muddy the waters on that which this time they are trying again, and is not working. Why?
POMERANTSEV: Well, two reasons I think. Firstly, Putin doesn`t seem to have told anybody outside of a tiny circle of people what he was about to do. So, many in the army didn`t know, many the Secret Service didn`t know. The cyber people didn`t seem to have known, and also the information army.
So, look, you`ve got to prepare a campaign like that. You`ve got to plan it. You would execute it. So that`s reason number one. So, that might come back by the way. They might be stunned at the moment, but that might come back.
But also, I think in the West, there`s much more awareness. We`re much better prepared, and there`s a lot more pushback as well.
HAYES: All right, Peter Pomerantsev who has written several books on this topic, I`ve learned a lot from him generally, thank you so much for your time tonight. I really, really appreciate it.
All right, that does it for ALL IN on this Monday night. Now, "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now with Ali Velshi who is live as we speak to him on the Ukrainian border. Ali, you`re a great journalist, and I`m glad you`re there. And I`m hoping you stay safe. And I`m going to go watch your show.
ALI VELSHI, MSNBC ANCHOR: Chris, I`m grateful for that. Thank you, my friend. We`ll see you again tomorrow night. And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.