The war isn't over or even slowing
Avdiivka in the east.
The next town, Moscow,
wants to slowly swallow
endless Ukrainian drone videos
show the huge losses.
The latest US
intelligence estimate,
Russia has had 13,000 casualties here,
a huge number offered without evidence.
But a clear bid to show American aid to
Ukraine is right now hurting Russia.
The lack of a potent summer breakthrough
means Ukraine's president
Volodymyr Zelensky
faces perhaps his toughest weeks ahead.
He had to take time away
from fighting Europe's
biggest war since the forties.
To get caught
between these two politicians
as they have their own squabble
here on Capitol Hill.
The lawmakers are eager to go home
for the holidays at the end of the week
In Ukraine,
weeks later,
they may start running out of money
on the front lines.
It is life and death.
One helicopter pilot in the east told me
it will be very difficult for us to fight
without your assistance.
But we have no choice
because this is very serious things,
because unfortunately,
we don't have enough power
within our country to support our army.
But we extremely need it.
This is just a question.
This is just a point of our survival.
Russia is relentless,
shelling the city of hers on hard
most nights and mornings this week
and said Ukraine's security service
possibly behind a cyberattack,
hitting a major cellphone provider.
It impacted air raid sirens,
air raid alerts on phones
and added to the sense of Putin moving in
on what's left of civilian safety
in Ukraine. As winter looks bleaker
now, Volodymyr Zelensky
returns to Ukraine
likely without achieving
the thing
that this trip
hoped he would do
with some officials here
warning that salaries
for doctors, first responders
on the front lines
may indeed run out in January
with clear public tension
with his chief of staff,
who ran a counter-offensive
that hasn't yielded
the results
that Ukraine and its Western backers
wanted.
The defense minister even today joking
that he hadn't heard whether or not
that chief of staff had indeed
been fired.
He hasn't. Just for clarity.
But Ukraine
also experienced
consistent Russian shelling
attacks on infrastructure.
The cell phone service
nationwide experiencing
what Ukraine said was
a Russian cyber attack today.
The problems mounting,
but this key one,
a lack of financing,
will burn in the next weeks.
Very hard Erin.
All right, Nick, thank you very much.
In Zaporizhzhia
And OUTFRONT now, long time Putin critic
Bill Browder.
He was once
the largest foreign investor in Russia.
Now he's on Putin's wanted list.
He's also the author of Freezing Order
A True Story of Money
Laundering, Murder and Surviving
Vladimir Putin's Wrath.
So, Bill, President Joe Biden said today
that if Congress fails to pass
this supplemental aid package,
it's going to give Putin
what he called
the greatest Christmas gift.
Is this how Putin sees it?
There's no question.
I mean,
so the Ukrainians showed us two years ago
that that with some resources,
even though they were outmanned
and outgunned,
they could fight the Russians back.
And a war
that should have lasted
three days is now going almost two years.
But that is contingent on Ukrainians
getting weapons
that they didn't have before
from the United States
and other countries.
And the United States
is responsible
for more military
and financial aid than any other country.
And so if for some reason,
the Americans can't provide
the Ukrainians
with any more financial aid,
then basically Putin
had to wait two years for this.
But he's going to get what he wants.
And President Biden is right about that.
So a source telling CNN today
that a declassified U.S.
intelligence
intelligence assessment
that Congress received in the context
of all of this conversation about aid.
Right.
Says that Putin has lost 315,000 troops
on the battlefield
and that the war has basically set back
15 years of Russian
effort to modernize its ground
force, 15 years.
So you could look at that and say
if you're
if you're looking at doing damage
to the Russian military machine,
that damage is being done.
But is there any point
at which these losses
get too big for Putin to continue?
And obviously,
this question would be contingent
upon, you know, support,
obviously continuing?
Well, I should point
out that Putin doesn't
really care
about how many of his own
soldiers are killed.
He has no empathy.
He's he's really a psychopath.
But having said that,
there is one factor,
which is that
he operates
in a country
with a lot of people who could
one day rise up against him.
And the 300 and some odd thousand people
who are dead.
That's 20 times
more than the Soviet Union lost
in Afghanistan.
They lost about 15,000.
And that was over a ten year period.
And that led to the mothers
of the Soviet Union rising up and forcing
the regime to withdraw from Afghanistan.
And so,
you know, it's it's Putin can do this
as long as he's running a complete
totalitarian system where everybody,
even the mothers and wives and sisters
and brothers of the soldiers were lost,
can't rise up.
But if at any point they start to rise up
and organize,
then Putin is really in a bad place.
And and so it's it's not certain what
that moment is.
And and Putin seems to think carry on.
Right. I mean, and that's the thing.
I mean, that moment hasn't happened.
I think confounding many. Right.
And the question is when.
I mean, one person who obviously had been
the leader of the opposition
had spoken up against Putin prior
to all this, was Alexei Navalny
poisoned with Novichok
put in a penal colony?
And one of his closest aides
yesterday told me
that he's been missing for a week
and that right before he went missing,
his lawyers were unable
to get access to him.
He's now
hasn't appeared at multiple hearings
that he had a health incident
and needed an I.V.
But no one knows anything
about what happened to him since then.
So he could be sick.
He could be moved to a worse
penal colony as as could be the case
could be dead. They don't know. I mean,
what do you think could happen here?
Well, I think I think the very best case
scenario is that they've put him
in the transfer system
between the prisons.
And we've seen this before
with with various people,
including Navalny.
Where where were you
when you're being transferred?
You effectively get lost
and nobody has access to where you are.
You can't communicate.
Your lawyers don't know where you are.
And that may be that may be where he is.
And that is the best case scenario.
And of course, the worst case scenario
is that something
catastrophic has happened
to Alexei Navalny,
and that's entirely possible.
And it's particularly
ominous
with the fact that he had this incident
where he collapsed six days ago,
and that was the last
anyone's ever heard from him.
Yeah, us, of course.
And we wait. We wait for news.
They're hearing nothing today for yet
another day.
Bill Browder, thank you very much.
Thank you.