want to i want to talk about your piece
and also talk about the war
in its larger context i must say that
the video that we're seeing of eight
ukrainian men just uh just being taken
across the street uh to be gunned down
uh one story one war crime after another
war crime
i must say
uh
i can't believe uh it's i guess it
shouldn't be surprising but it is still
so shocking how barbaric these russian
troops
under the guidance of vladimir putin are
just barbaric
there's no serious commander control
the a lot of these guys are
out pretty much freelancing it um and
even if they were under stricter russian
control the orders have been um to
subjugate and pacify these areas and the
russians only know one way to do that
which is to go in and
kill people who resist them and kill
people who don't resist them as examples
to others i mean this is really um you
know this is world war ii kind of stuff
uh that they're that they're putting
into effect here and there's a certain
amount of rage as well that somehow um
these these people did not greet them as
liberators and that therefore they are
somehow um traitors or
um people who need to be singled out for
punishment including some of the russian
speakers who have been
um
singled out because of course they were
supposed to be more they were supposed
to be happier than anyone to see the
russians but this is the this is the
russian pattern and there's no reason to
think it's going to stop
no it's what they did in chechnya it's
it's what they did in syria obviously in
aleppo it's what they keep doing it's
what vladimir putin does um so it has
seemed that that putin has been
oblivious uh the reason the logic to
outside information to truth
but you believe that putin may be
reassessing his situation tell us why
i'm not sure if putin is reassessing or
if someone is reassessing
inside the kremlin
there are three things that made me
wonder what's going on
inside moscow and inside a very small
part of moscow behind those kremlin
walls
one of them was this kind of somber and
downbeat um victory day speech where a
lot of folks including me
had real concerns that he was going that
putin was going to step forward and say
okay now it's it's all out war
um we're gonna because russia still has
unexpected capacity here russia could
step up this war um believe it or not
joe they could be even more brutal than
they are um and and apply more force
here um but instead putin sort of whined
that he had no choice and that he had to
act against nato and
kind of gave some of these laugh out
loud explanations that even he doesn't
believe the second is that um we now
have high high-level military contacts
opening up again which kind of surprises
me
um the defense minister and the chief of
the russian
general staff have been allowed to pick
up the phone and talk to their american
counterparts which
there's been silence on those lines depe
despite repeated american efforts now
for months
um
for some reason in the past week
both the defense minister sergey shoigu
and the chief of the russian general
staff
valerie garasimov have both picked up
the phone and had you know perfunctory
but nonetheless
um you know reestablishment of
communications kind of discussions with
their opposite numbers with lloyd austin
and mark milley and the third thing is
the appearance on russian television of
a retired russian staff colonel
named uh
who he
is a trenchant and very somber critic of
the war he is not young he's not an
anti-war protester he's this very kind
of
stoic and solid presence who says
who warned russia in february that they
could lose this war who now says here's
why we're losing the whole world is
against us
we have made a mistake here you know he
doesn't criticize putin but he talks
about how let me ask you this wasn't
going to go away go better than it is
yeah let me ask you why did that happen
i was comparing this i was trying to
figure out why they allowed him on
television that that didn't just happen
somebody made the decision to let him on
television
hard to believe it would be putin but it
reminded me of the old mayday parades
where we were looking up at the
politburo waving from the platform uh
trying to figure out who was in power uh
and sort of the criminal criminologists
would try to sort through what they were
seeing what's your best guess
on why he was allowed to go on russian
television and pick this invasion apart
piece by piece
yeah i i was one of those criminologists
and i have the same question you do now
who whose idea was this
um who allowed him there you know when
he first appeared
um a lot of folks on social media kept
asking me well is he gonna get thrown
out of a window is he gonna drink poison
tea no
he if he was on tv it's because someone
meant him to be there
and i don't the the the least
encouraging explanation is that he was
put there so that the public could kind
of vent with him to say see
you know there are responsible people
looking at this and and our voices are
being heard this kind of managed dissent
i'm not sure that's the case i think it
it may well be that the either the
kremlin or the defense establishment in
russia
they may be trying to lower expectations
about how this war is going to come out
they may be saying you know that this
was the odds were just so against us
that this march to kiev that we had
talked about isn't going to happen
it's also possible that somebody put him
on there as a shot over putin's bow to
say look we tried it your way and here's
why it went bad and we need to think
about something else which of those
explanations is true
i wish i could tell you i knew joe but i
don't
yeah it's hard to say and mikay will
tell you this
putin doesn't do managed dissent very
well
so i i'm not sure if it is managed
descent but that is one explanation one
possibility well isabelle i really appre
appreciate your latest piece because it
drills down and focuses in on on the
suffering of ukrainians and and a type
of story that that's happening thousands
of times over in ukraine it's called in
ukraine
a perilous journey to bury a 13 year old
girl and you write in part this the
story of how thirteen-year-old sophia
rayetzkaz remains wound up here near
battles with russia in northeastern
ukraine and separated from any relative
is the story of a war that can reach any
ukrainian
sophia and her family had fled
bombardment but where they thought would
be a safe place was soon occupied by
russian soldiers when they tried to
leave on may 4th russians fired on their
vehicle ukrainian investigators say
sophia was dead at the scene
her mother and
six-month-old sister were taken to a
hospital back in the occupied territory
with no way to get sophia the only
relatives who could give sophia a proper
burial were more than 125 miles away
along a different part of the front line
now
kalodov an ambulance driver had
volunteered to help her finish the
journey there are so many stories like
this uh he said too many and isabelle uh
give us a sense of sort of the overload
of the suffering that is happening right
now in ukraine i think sometimes we
we look at the military moves but the
ukrainians daily are taking the brunt of
this war
yeah absolutely it's a war that
you know even if you live in a peaceful
city even if you live in western ukraine
um because you tried to get away from
the fighting or you fled there as an
evacuee
a russian missile strike can still hit
you there you're still within reach um
this family
you know they lived kind of close to the
front line in the donbass region
uh for the past eight years where there
was a conflict they thought they went
somewhere safe
you know that's the place that ended up
under russian occupation uh you know
when it got noisy there again
you know and they couldn't stand being
under russian occupation anymore and
wanted to run again
um
you know their vehicle gets fired on by
russians as they're trying to get out of
the occupied area uh and you know after
all of that the funeral happens at back
along the other part of the front line
um less than a mile away from kind of
where russian positions are
and kind of at the end of the funeral
there was shelling again that their
village was being targeted
uh it's just it's split families this
war it's people being displaced
it's um
you know obviously people losing family
members you know the volunteers who
transported this body said this is a
pretty common situation where
uh there's just no one to even claim the
dead and they have to help people grieve
that that's such a big part of this is
it's so hard for just ukrainians to move
on with their lives when they haven't
even been able to
grieve their
loved ones because of just how much this
war touches every one of them in so many
ways
do
[Music]
you