- The devastation of war.

- Yesterday, the world did nothing.

Crawl the sky - [Reporter] Russia's invasion of Ukraine takes another tragic turn after president Putin's forces target hospitals and civilians.

- We have the in witnessing for weeks atrocities of unimaginable proportion.

- [Reporter] The attacks intensified calls to investigate Russia and Putin for war crimes.

- Enough talk.

People are dying, send them the planes that they need.

- [Reporter] And for the U.S. and NATO allies to do more.

Meanwhile.

- We did not attack Ukraine.

A situation developed in Ukraine, which poses a direct threat to the security of the Russian Federation.

- [Reporter] Russia continues its disinformation campaign.

Plus.

- We're gonna jointly announce several new steps to squeeze Putin and hold him even more accountable for his aggression against Ukraine.

- [Reporter] The Biden administration gets more aggressive and already soaring gas prices jump even higher.

Next.

(bright music) - [Narrator] This is Washington Week.

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Once again from Washington, moderator Yamiche Alcindor.

- Good evening, and welcome to Washington Week.

It's been almost three weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine.

And as this war grinds on, the death toll keeps rising.

And the destruction is worsening.

This week for the first time, Russia expanded its attacks into Western Ukraine.

It's an area that had been a safe haven, and is closer to NATO territory.

Also Russian forces are now surrounding several of Ukraine's largest cities.

With all this violence, Europe is seeing the largest exodus of refugees since World War II.

On Wednesday, Russian forces bombed a maternity and children's hospital, in the Southern city of Mariupol.

The attack took place during what was supposed to be a 12-hour ceasefire to allow civilians to escape.

Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, condemned the assault.

- A strike on a maternity hospital is a final proof.

A proof of genocide of Ukrainians is taking place.

- Meanwhile, President Biden acknowledged that the new ban on Russian energy imports will mean higher gas prices for Americans.

- Today, we remain united, we remain united in our purpose to keep pressure mounting on Putin and his war machine.

I'm gonna do everything I can to minimize Putin's price hike here at home.

- The president also warned that if Russia uses chemical weapons in Ukraine, it will pay, I quote, "Severe price."

Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Nick Schifrin, foreign affairs and defense correspondent for PBS News Hour.

He is back with us in Lviv, Ukraine.

And also joining me here in studio, we're so happy to have people in studio, Sahil Kapur, senior national political reporter for NBC News, and MJ Lee, White House correspondent for CNN.

Thank you all for being here.

Nick, you've been reporting now on the ground for two weeks and you said, and I have to look down at my notes for this because it's striking, "Europe has not seen this sort of bombardment in 80 years."

You also mentioned mass graves.

What's the latest here on where things stand especially as Russia is now going into Western Ukraine?

- So I think the attacks in Western Ukraine are new and they do perhaps identify an expansion of this war we don't really know why, but perhaps trying to get at some of the arms, some of the aid that's coming in from Poland into Ukraine that the U.S. and NATO countries continue to send.

But you mentioned those mass graves, and that really is right now, the story of this war.

You mentioned Mariupol in the South.

This is a city that faced war in 2014 when the Russians initially invaded into Eastern Ukraine.

But the war in Mariupol today is frankly medieval.

It has been a week since half a million people had any food, had any water, had any electricity.

The Russians bragged this morning that they had destroyed every bridge that led out of that city.

There is no way to get aid in, and there is no way to get anyone out.

And it has been six days straight where the Russians promised that there would be a cease fire, and instead shelled the very buildings where civilians were supposed to gather in order to evacuate.

So the level of destruction in Mariupol is akin to what we saw over the last few years in Syria.

And the level of suffering of hundreds of thousands of people in that city, as well as other cities, especially in the South, and a couple in the Northeast as well is just extraordinary.

And the Ukrainians are trying their best to resist this Russian onset, and they're having some success.

But in these individual cities where they are struggling so much to get any kind of assistance in and any kind of civilians out, the conditions are dire.

- Nick, as you said, the destruction and the mass graves being such a big part of the story, you talk about half a million people with no water.

With all of this happening, more than 2 million people have already fled Ukraine.

And according to UNICEF, at least half of those refugees are children.

Here's a woman describing the destruction in her city.

- We don't have electricity, we don't have anything to eat, we don't have medicine.

We have nothing.

- Nick, you were here last week talking about sort of your interviews, and experiences with the refugees that are leaving.

What sticks with you now in the second week as you're joining us again?

- I think the main thing for people to notice, if you will, about this particular refugee and internally displaced person crisis is that it is not families, it is women and children.

The Ukrainian government has banned Ukrainian men between 18 and 60 from leaving the country unless you have three or more children.

And so the number of scenes that have played out on so many TV screens across the world over the last few weeks, it is just absolutely heartbreaking to see these families split up.

And so the level of fear that people have to have for what's happening in their cities in order to get on trains, in order to get in cars, in order to get out of their cities by any means necessary while the Russians are shelling.

Some of these roads that they're escaping on is just extraordinary.

But what is also amazing, Yamiche, about this is the fearlessness of many of those men who are dropping their families off at the border and volunteering to fight.

The fearlessness of Ukrainian soldiers who are way outgunned and way outarmed, at least on paper, but are really having some individual successes against Russian troops.

And so those two things really combine in this war.

And you just see the combination of a country that is facing an existential threat, countless families being ripped apart, and yet so many people here defending their land and defending their freedom.

- And MJ, as we talk about that and you hear Nick describing the devastation but also the fearlessness, what's the pressure on the White House to do more?

There' also, of course, the President said over and over again, we're not gonna go in militarily, but what's the thinking as things just get worse?

- Even today, the President announced these new economic measures to try to put the pressure on Vladimir Putin.

And I think the administration is pretty close to facing an existential question when it comes to these sanctions measures, and that question is, what is the point, what is it accomplishing?

Because remember, initially the reason that the White House held off on rolling out these sanctions was because they wanted the threat of the sanctions to serve as a deterrent.

That was not successful.

And then when the invasion began, they hoped that the threat of more sanctions would deter Russia from doing a more widespread invasion.

That was not successful.

So at this point it does seem like a part of the thinking by the White House is to maybe sort of ramp up the pressure campaign, particularly on the people around Vladimir Putin, the people who are wealthy, the oligarchs who would be very unhappy about some of these measures that are putting place on them, but we have actually no idea at this point whether any of these things are going to work.

And whether they have worked in the past, we clearly see that they have not.

- And Sahil, you are fresh off the Amtrak from Philadelphia.

Thank you for joining us.

You were at the Democrats retreat.

It's interesting that President Biden today said to Democrats, "Be very careful about talking about military action because it would be World War III."

Based on your reporting and your time at that retreat, how much of this pressure is mounting among Democrats, but also among Republicans, I should say, for the president to do more, and how really are they telegraphing that to the president?

- Yeah, the footage we just saw there was horrific, the scenes, the violence that's escalating.

I think lawmakers are certainly paying attention to that as well as the cries for help of Ukrainian President, Zelenskyy, he's been very effective at social media.

And just this past week yesterday, Congress passed a major package of Ukraine aid totaling 13.6 billion, that has multiple components of humanitarian assistance through USAID, disaster and refugee aid, there is military assistance through the form of weapons transfers to the Ukrainians and neighboring countries to defend themselves.

There is economic aid as well for the macroeconomic needs of Ukraine for their energy and cybersecurity infrastructure as well as the Baltic state.

So Congress has gotten its act together on this.

Now how it's gonna be delivered is another thing.

But the president was very clear today in his remarks that he does not want to start World War III.

He used that phrase multiple times.

That is off the table and that's one of the reasons the White House has been emphatic in opposition to a no-fly zone, which is where most members of Congress that I've spoken to also stand.

What he does wanna do is help the Ukrainians, and he does wanna tighten noose as much as possible on Vladimir Putin and Russia through economic means, even though, as MJ just pointed out, that may not be enough to stop him on this.

- Nick, that really takes me to you when you think about sort of what will stop President Putin.

There is this conversation going on about the threat of chemical weapons.

President Biden said that Russia would pay this, as we said, a severe price if chemical weapons were used in Ukraine.

What's your sense talking to folks?

Of course they are on the ground, but I know you have national security sources.

How concerned are they about the threat of chemical weapons?

- They are concerned, which is why the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, tweeted about it the other night, and officials have been talking about it.

They've been concerned, frankly for weeks, according to some of the people I've talked to, because they simply don't see an exit ramp.

They don't see the Russian invasion succeeding, they don't see anytime soon Vladimir Putin accomplishing what he, at least the U.S. thinks, that he still wants to accomplish, which is regime change here in Kyiv, which is essentially overthrowing the Ukrainian government and replacing it with some kind of versatile state.

And so because it turns out that that is not so easy in Ukraine, because so many intelligence officials are struggling to figure out what exactly is motivating Putin and what exactly he's thinking right now and how isolated he is, the fear is that he would resort to something much more drastic.

Ukrainian officials, frankly, think that Putin has been uncontrollable for a long time, and so they kind of joke because they would agree that he's capable of anything as well.

They're much more focused on the conventional threat that they face, trying their best, using small teams of Ukrainian soldiers around the country to defeat that more armed enemy, and using frankly much more motivated soldiers.

We've talked to multiple soldiers here, including one today who I met about five or six years ago on the front lines, and he described his own injuries in a town right outside of Kyiv.

And he also described that they, in his words, destroyed the entire Russian unit that they faced, which was actually bigger than them.

And he said that, "We were simply more motivated and the Russians were acting like they were here a day on the job," and they simply did not have the same motivation the same fighting spirit the Ukrainians did.

- MJ, I wanna ask you a quick question, I wanna follow up more with the kerfuffle over the sort of Poland planes.

But first chemical weapons, does it change the White House's view of all of this?

- Well, clearly there is assessment that the White House and this administration has that has made them nervous about this and even more nervous in the couple of days we have seen different language coming from this White House.

I will say, I think what is really notable about the fact that this administration has started warning about the possibility of this kind of attack is that throughout this entire conflict, this administration has said, "We are going to be as transparent as we can be about the intelligence that we have, and actually sharing with the public about what we think Putin is about to do."

A part of that thinking is to try to catch him off guard, have him look up and see that the U.S. is actually broadcasting what he thinks he's going to do, what they think he's going to do.

- And if I could, I wanna also though ask you because what he could do and what sort of all these sort of changes that are happening, the fluidity of all of this is that Poland surprised American officials this week by offering to turnover its aging Russian-made planes, but there was a catch.

And that catch is that they would have to make a deal with the United States to backfill.

Talk about what happened there and where things could go going forward.

- Well there was actually a pretty extraordinary moment that we saw this week where the Polish government said one thing, they put out this proposal that the U.S. could basically help them transfer the Soviet era fighter jets to Ukraine.

The U.S then comes out and says, actually we're rejecting this proposal, this is untenable.

The reason that this was actually such a striking moment was because on the whole, we haven't seen these kinds of disagreements.

We haven't seen the U.S. and its allies not be on the same page.

And I think actually that's one area where there's not a lot of good news in any of this, but if you do talk to officials, one thing that they will sort of repeatedly sound a little more optimistic about is the fact that they feel like the U.S. and its allies have been on the same page.

So that's why that little moment of disagreement breakdown in communication is what Jen Psaki said to me in the briefing this week was so notable this week.

- And you think about sort of that moment of disagreement, Sahil, you talked a little bit about the aid to Ukraine.

How does that sort of enter into all of this, the idea you talked a bit about what Congress has done?

But I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the impact of that aid as we're seeing these sort of breakdowns in communications I called it a kerfuffle.

- Right, it's a precarious situation, and there's a lot for President Biden and for members Congress to balance, starting with the fact that Americans are very war weary.

The last two wars that the United States was engaged in, the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war ended up extremely unpopular.

And I think the administration and lawmakers are facing a lot of pressure not to get bogged down into something over the long term.

As much as Americans are sympathetic to the Ukrainians, as to the Ukraine has won, I think, the hearts of much of the world, not just the Western world, even China felt the need to abstain from that security council resolution, didn't wanna punish Russia.

But there's also the political consideration that President Biden and Congress is facing, which is that the vast majority of Americans are going to experience this war through the prism of gas prices at the pump, that's the harsh reality of it.

And that's why president Biden is trying to set expectations just be forthright with voters that gas prices are going to go up, and blame this on Putin.

He called it Putin's gas tax.

- Really it's a good transition to what I was gonna ask as my second question to you, which is that there is bipartisan support for the sanctions against Russia, but Republicans argue policies enacted by President Biden have also caused the rise in gas prices.

- I expect our democratic friends will now try to blame the entire increase in prices on our efforts to punish Russia.

But don't be fooled, this was more than a year in the making.

- And Sahil, of course, it's not a surprise to see Mitch McConnell being critical of the president, but how are Republicans and Democrats gearing up to make this a wedge issue ahead of the midterms?

- Well, this is a back and forth we're going to see constantly between now and the midterm elections.

Inflation was a problem even before Putin invaded Ukraine, and Democrats are very sensitive to the fact that rising prices is something that voters have cited as a top concern if not the top concern, so we're seeing the battle lines drawn.

Republicans are arguing that this was to be blamed on President Biden and his administration's policies with regard to energy, they say he's not doing enough to produce domestic energy, which is code for produce more fossil fuels, produce more oil here.

And the president's counter argument is that there are thousands and thousands of permits that are being unused for drilling here.

And that the cause is much more complicated than things that his administration did.

- MJ, I was watching you as he was describing the president's comeback, jump in here.

- Well, one really telling moment, I think, from this week was when the president sort of laid out all of the things that he hoped to do to try to keep gas prices under control.

And he made this promise, right?

"I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that this is as contained as possible."

And then a couple of hours later, he goes on a trip to Texas, he's getting off Air Force One and he says, "Actually can't do much right now."

And I think that actually is the more honest answer that captures sort of the mood at the White House and this administration when it comes to this issue.

It doesn't take actually a rocket sciences test to tell you, yes, gas prices are...

It's a very, very difficult problem to solve.

It is not something where you can roll out a couple of policy agenda items and then have gas prices drop.

Even the things that the administration is working on right now, boosting global energy supply, having conversations with countries like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, those are all sort of longer term things, and the president certainly knows that.

- And Nick, as we're talking about this, I wanna, in some ways, make a hard shift here because you're an expert of not just Russia, but also of China.

And I had to ask you this question, which is, China is sort of factoring in here.

Russia's looking at them thinking maybe they can help out because of these sanctions.

What are you hearing from your sources about how China falls into all of this?

- I think one of the main points that we all have to remember is that if Russia is going to need to rely on China for buying gas, buy natural gas, buying oil and also technological things like chips and aspects that the west is no longer going to sell to Russia is that China's not there yet.

It would take about a decade, officials have told me, for China to build the kind of pipelines that Russia has invested into Europe.

And while China has advanced in the last few years since the Trump administration targeted Huawei and targeted Chinese technology so much, the Chinese advances have come in the last couple of years, they are not where the U.S. is, they're not where the West is.

And so Russia simply can't rely on China for purchasing enough oil and natural gas for the technology that it is going to lose, or it is losing from the West.

So I think that we don't really know how far China will go or won't go, there's some signs on either side frankly when it comes to Russia, but the bottom line is, Russia cannot rely on China for everything.

- And in the last 30 seconds here, Nick, I wanna come back to you.

Just talk a bit more about the fearlessness and how Ukrainians feel about this war possibly going on for months and years.

And again, we got about 30 seconds, we wanna let you lean in on that.

- I don't think that they're fully acknowledging that this war could go on for months and years because they're surviving every day.

And that ultimately is what this is about.

It is a fearlessness born out of necessity, born out of an existential threat.

They are fighting for the very existence of their government and their country since '91, being an independent state.

And that is what's motivating them, and that's what creates that fearlessness.

- And it is something that I think has also captured as you said, the attention of the world.

I was struck by the fact that you did a story where children's letters were sent to volunteers fighting on the front lines.

It was a moving thing to watch.

So hopefully folks can watch that on PBS News Hour, look it up.

Thank you so much to Nick who's out in the field and to all our guests for joining us and sharing your reporting.

We will continue our conversation on the Washington Week Extra.

There we'll talk about president Biden's domestic challenges.

He has a lot, and find that on our website, Facebook, and YouTube, and tune in Monday to the PBS News Hour for more on-the-ground in Ukraine.

Thank you so much for joining us.

I'm Yamiche Alcindor, good night from Washington.