Putin’s ‘nuclear’ alert due to failure to ‘intimidate’ Zelenskyy and the West: Amb. Taylor
Fast Facts
- Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko have announced talks will take place between Russia and Ukraine.
- The U.S. Embassy in Russia urged American nationals to leave the country as airlines continue to cancel flights into and out of Russia.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin put his nuclear deterrent forces on an elevated alert status on Sunday.
Russian-led forces have taken control of the historically significant town of Nikolayevka, where Soviet forces broke out during the second world war during the Battle of Stalingrad.
Analysts say Russian forces could now begin to consolidate and make gains that would allow them to push towards the Black Sea.
U.S. stock futures tumbled on Sunday as investors continue to monitor the developments between Russia and Ukraine and after U.S. and foreign allies agreed to remove select Russian banks from SWIFT, the global financial system, curbing access to banks in over 200 countries.
Dow futures fell nearly 600 points or 1.5%, while S&P 500 and Nasdaq Futures traded lower by nearly 3% a piece.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing “poker” with the U.S. and other European allies while waging a war against Ukraine, according to one expert.
Retired CIA Senior Clandestine Services Officer Dan Hoffman told Fox News Digital that the profile of Putin has changed drastically over the past two weeks, and argues that Putin isn’t playing “chess” anymore, he’s playing “poker” with innocent civilians being killed.
“The profile of Vladimir Putin from today is not the one that we would have written two weeks ago, or two years ago. And so if we thought about Vladimir Putin as a coldly calculated chess player, which I frankly thought he was, and I thought he was going to extort a deal out of us and never go to war against Ukraine because it would be too prohibitively costly in terms of spilled blood,” Hoffman said. “But that’s not the guy we’re dealing with now. So it’s almost like we’ve seen a transition from a chess player to a poker player.”
“For the first time in decades, it has called for an Emergency Special Session in the General Assembly,” U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said of the Security Council Sunday. “The Council members who supported this resolution recognize that this is no ordinary moment.”