Alex Marquardt is OUTFRONT in Kiev tonight to begin our coverage. And Alex, what is the latest on the ground there tonight? Aaron, we are seeing the beginning stages of this new Russian offensive and so far it is not going well. One senior State Department official on Thursday said that it is very pathetic. We are getting that update on the fighting in back moved from the White House, that city where for the past few months, Ukraine has been locked in a fierce battle with Russian forces from the Virginia group made up of mercenaries and convicts. The White House is John Kirby saying that in December. 90% of the deaths from Virginia were convicts, a recruitment tool, he says that shows no sign of abating. Plus, just a week from the first anniversary of the Russian invasion. This is according to President Vladimir. The toughest fight in Ukraine right now in the eastern city of Bermuda called a meat grinder by both sides. Russian troops from the Wagner mercenary group, most of them convicts, continue to be sent in wave after wave to their deaths. Men that he just plucked out of prisons and threw on a battlefield with no training, no equipping, no organization or command, just throw him into the fight. 90% killed were convicts. We believe that Wagner continues to rely heavily on these convicts in the back fighting, and that doesn’t show any signs of abating. The battle laying bare, the stark divisions on the Russian side. You would get a common video button with Bognor chief Evgeny Prigozhin openly blasting Russia’s official military leadership, saying they managed soldiers from beauty salons and country clubs, arguing that if there were more of his private troops, they would be halfway across Ukraine by now. The toll has been so severe on the Russian side that according to Ukrainian officials, regular troops have been back filling Wagner mechanized infantry and tank units supported by artillery and aircraft. If Russia were to take back mud, it would change little but be a symbolic victory as Ukraine struggles to keep them at bay. President Zelensky today urging world leaders at the Munich Security Conference to speed up their military aid comparing the fight to Goliath, taking on David and his sling. We need to hurry up. We need the speed, speed of our agreements, speed of our delivery to strengthen our slowing speed of decisions to limit Russian potential that Russian potential is still significant, with hundreds of thousands of mobilized troops believed to be in reserve. And Russian President Vladimir Putin able to call up more to offset his enormous losses. Now, according to the U.S. State Department, numbering over 200,000 Russian dead and wounded We should note that Ukraine has also suffered tremendous losses both in this fight and Mahmud and all across the country over the past year. But Ukraine and the U.S. are less transparent about those numbers. Now, the United States would like to see Ukraine shift its focus from back mount to a looming counter-offensive in the south that would be made up of some newly trained troops and armored vehicles. Today, we learned that 635 Ukrainian troops have just finished a five week training course at a U.S. base in Germany. Second phase has now started with 710 new Ukrainian troops. Much of the training focus on combined arms and maneuvers with those armored vehicles that the U.S. believes will be critical in taking back territory from Russia. Alex, thank you very much, from Kiev tonight. And OUTFRONT now, Michael Bociurkiw, the senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, He is based in the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa. And retired Air Force Colonel Cedric Leighton. Thanks so much to both of you. Colonel Leighton, let me just start with you. Where what with what Alex was saying, that Russia is struggling to get a new offensive going, a battered military, the tremendous losses, obviously, from Wagner being a part of that. What would a massive Russian offensive look like with the military that they have now? You know, presuming that they have tens of thousands or more troops that they’re about to commit to it. Yeah, Erin, that’s really interesting. In normal times, you would see a Russian offensive would look like a huge massive of soldiers going forward with locked tanks, helicopters and air support. The air support is definitely lacking. It has been lacking so far. You also have a situation where there are really problems back showing the losses that the Russians have had that Alex mentioned in his report. So you’re going to see probably is this attempt to like you see in Barbuda and in other places along the front where there are going to be these probes that are moving forward. But those probes are not going to be effective unless they find certain weaknesses in the Ukrainian lines. But generally speaking, it’s going to be an attempt with a lot of artillery, with a lot of a movement forward. But those movements are going to be stopped pretty much up front line at this point. So, Michael, you know, Colonel Leighton says, you know, you would have a lot of air support and there hasn’t been that thus far. That’s true. But we do understand that you know, today in the meeting with Alexander Lukashenko, Lukashenko promised Putin that Belarus is ready to produce fighter jets for Russia. We know from Western intelligence that they have been putting a lot of fighter jets on Belarus and bases. And U.S. intelligence is saying or Western intelligence is warning of a massive air assault. So it’s unclear how that would play in. But all of those pieces are in place. And you say Russia is currently using balloons in some way related to this. What more do you know about that? Right. So from Ukraine, to media and other sources, this is basically a cheap Russian tactic to distract Ukrainian radar, to confuse its air defense systems and to lure the Ukrainians into wasting ammunition on these balloons. But I think what we’re seeing is another attempt by Russia to ratchet things up. And I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news but I think what we’re looking at right now, Erin, is a another attempt by Russia taking advantage of that gap between when pledges of western tanks were made and when the tanks actually arrive to do another major assault from the north, from the east and from the south. It could be devastating to Ukraine. But being in Ukraine as long as I have, I know that there’s resilience. There is very strong. The Western weaponry is coming. But Putin, I think, is a man who cannot accept defeat and I think it was Mitch McConnell who said today that unless he’s pushed back, we can expect not only other dictators to be emboldened, but this to turn into a very, very expensive war, because we will continue to fight this from many, many more fronts. Yeah. And you know what this offensive could look like. Of course, this is the crucial question. And Colonel Leighton, to this point that Michael’s making about the weaponry coming in. You’ve got a bipartisan group in Congress or he mentions that Senator McConnell calling on the Biden administration to send F-16 fighter jets to Kiev as soon as possible. Now, there’s a gap of time, as Michael points out. Right. Tanks are promised. Those Abrams tanks are not coming any time soon. They’re just not ready. Biden has resisted the F-16s. And he said, you know, it would it would seriously escalate the situation. This has been from the very beginning. Did the US wait too long on this front? First for the F-16s for air? Yes, it absolutely did. Yeah. And what should have happened is about two months into this war, starting from February of last year, we should have started the training of F-16 pilots, or at least the transition of Ukrainian pilots into F-16. That would have then given the Ukrainians time to get familiar with the platform, be able to employ the platform and also get familiar with the avionics. Plus, it would also have allowed them to train maintenance troops as well as the intelligence forces and radar operators in order to effectively employ this weapon system in a combined arms manner. And that would be the kind of thing that would have been necessary. So at this point, you know, points out we’re going to be racing against the clock in several different ways. And that’s going to be very tough on the Ukrainians. And Michael, all in the U.S. has spent about $100 billion pledged in aid to Ukraine. Zelensky said he’s going to appoint a new leader to the anti-corruption agency there. He’s fired. Now, there’s been to sort of big purges, one last summer and one recently of officials for corruption, most recently tied to were supplies, procurement. So how big of an issue is this? Absolutely huge. Both inside and outside of Ukraine. Outside of Ukraine, the world is watching how Ukrainian is conducting itself militarily, but also spending these billions in aid. And they have to be spent very carefully. So these allegations come at a very bad time. And by the way, they were uncovered by Ukrainian journalists. Secondly, I speak to a lot of Ukrainians both inside and outside of Ukraine. And the one thing the one thing they want other than Russia being completely pushed out of Ukraine and defeated, is that war on corruption to continue to the very end. It will take some time. But I think that the Ukrainians who have, for example, left Ukraine millions of them, especially the young ones, the ones in high tech, for example, want to come to back to Ukraine, which is build back better, where corruption is no longer a daily fact of life. So Zelensky credit to him for cracking down as he did, but there are still a lot of officials there and who were allowed to gracefully resign. So he really has to come down hard on this. All right.
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