On the third day of the Russian attacks on Ukraine, on-the-ground footage shows daily life turned upside down. As the Ukrainian military and volunteers fight to slow Russian forces, civilians scramble for shelter, finding less and less safe ground. Has Vladimir Putin lost touch with reality? Catherine Belton, a former Moscow-based correspondent for the Financial Times, said that the Russian president is now isolated and paranoid, having launched a war in Ukraine that has alarmed even some of his closest advisers. Hours before Putin placed Russian nuclear forces on high alert, he talked about why the battle for Ukraine could be the Russian president's waterloo. An edited transcript of a conversation with Yahoo News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff, Yahoo News editor in chief Daniel Klaidman, and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice was published. Michael Isikoff is talking about extraordinary time and events. You dug into the past of Vladimir Putin and his associates. The United States and its allies are trying to deter Putin with harsher sanctions. The United States announced on Friday that they were going to impose sanctions on Putin. Is any of this having an effect on the Kremlin? I am afraid that it is not having too much impact on Putin. I guess the question is: Is he acting alone now? I can not imagine that his decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was supported by a majority of his own top officials. You could see that on their faces when he held the Security Council meeting. They didn't want to be there and you could see the fear in their eyes. They all looked uncomfortable. Many in Moscow were shocked by Putin's actions this week. I think many were preparing for him to recognize the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk, because they have been independent since 2015. They were held by people who were backed by the Kremlin. It would have allowed Putin to leave. He has taken another slice of Ukraine. He could try to get concessions from Zelensky and NATO on missile shields in order to menace the Ukrainian president from the borders. The Russian stock market lost half its value after the invasion. The people around him are so surprised that they think Putin has changed. There has been a shift here. People talk about him being isolated. Why do you think it happened? Everyone is trying to guess at the answer, including high-ranking officials in Moscow who really don't understand what's changed. We can only assume it is the last two years of the Pandemic, where he has been increasingly isolated. He has become obsessed with history and his place as the restorer of the Russian lands. He placed a lot of importance on restoring Russia's greatness and restoring its imperial past. We know that even when he was the deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, he was suggesting that Ukraine was not a real country. He blamed the revolutionaries for creating an artificial republic in his speech on Monday. He thinks it should be part of the Russian empire. We have always seen him act with a degree of cool rationality, no matter what he has done. He has lost touch with reality. It seems like he thought the Ukrainians would back down. Maybe he thought Zelensky would do the same thing. I think he didn't expect such a strong response from the Western world, because Russia's economy is going to be devastated, and it's getting cut off from all. Many Russians are devastated by what has happened. Do you think that Ukraine is the end of his kind of descent into madness? I guess we have to hope so. The signs are positive. The stronger the resistance from the West, the more likely it is that this is the end, that it is his waterloo, and it will lead to his downfall. We have to see how long Zelensky can last. Will the U.S. and the rest of the Western allies escalate their response? I think we are only seeing the beginning of the impact of the sanctions that were launched earlier this week. The sanctions against Moscow-run financial services company Sberbank, against Russian state bank VTB, barring them from conducting dollar transactions, are pretty tough. There are signs of a run on the banks. Russia's Central Bank has made strong interventions in the market to prop up the ruble. It is a question of how long it can continue. If the U.S. goes ahead and sanctions Russia's Central Bank, it will wipe out a huge chunk of Russia's hard currency reserves. You would hope that that would be a very strong deterrent against Putin going further than he already is. I spoke to a Moscow businessman who said that it was not possible. Putin cannot back out now. He has crossed the threshold. He would lose his face. Some of the economic sanctions are still in Putin's hand. He can counter-retaliate against the Western world. What are the chances that he will retaliate against Russia and Ukraine for their actions regarding energy and mineral reserves? At the moment, Putin is scrambling. He hasn't decided how he's going to react because I think he's facing much stronger resistance from the West than he thought. I think he was not expecting so much trouble. I think he didn't think that the strong response would come from this. I think that he had a plan that they might be able to escape through the Western sanctions. They have been creating their own alternative to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. I was told that Russia had created its own system, and that the biggest state banks were barred from conducting dollar transactions because of the sanctions. A program for correspondent accounts with the Chinese was being developed by the Russian Central Bank. The news yesterday that some big Chinese banks were refusing to carry out Russian dollar transactions, Russian dollar contracts, and they don't have the support from the Chinese that they expected, appears to be not working. I think that Putin is finding his way. We don't know what he's going to do We all saw how scared they were of him during the Security Council meeting, so I think they just have to follow orders. Boeing is a big importer of Russian titanium and he could stop it from being exported to the West. It needs to build something. That could be something he could do. I don't think he would cut off oil and gas supplies to Europe and the rest of the West because it would be like cutting off his nose to spite his face. Isikoff said that his description of the National Security Council meeting with Putin addressing it and his advisers being startled and unnerved by what he was saying was pretty scary. Nobody could stop him. I am wondering if you have reported on the people around Putin, the silovaki. Do you think that any of the close Putin advisers are on board with what he is trying to do here? I would think that the head of the Security Council or the head of the FSB would be on board with this plan. I think his advisers are the ones. Patrushev has always been the leader of using capitalism as a tool to undermine the West to buy off corrupt officials and so on. He painted the West as a hostile enemy of Russia and it was time to attack. The rest would not. I think you could see that in the eyes of Sergey Naryshkin, Putin's foreign intelligence chief, who was reprimanded very harshly for not speaking clearly or fluffing his lines about recognizing the independence of Luhansk. The impact on the economy is so deep that even the chief of the Russian energy giant, who has made quite considerable personal fortune, might support this. Isikoff has to answer one quick question. We were talking about Bortnikov. The other day, I noticed that the U.S. is not. The Treasury Department was targeting one of his children. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, Isikoff is in the West. I saw that as the first step in a roll out of additional sanctions against Putin's children, who are supposed to have bank accounts in other countries. The U.S. has sanctions against Putin, but he has no assets in the West that could be seized. Why are they not going after his kids? I think that would be a very good next step. I think that would hurt Putin. I think he's always resisted public mention of his family. He has always tried to keep them out of the public eye. But that bridge could be too far? I wonder if that would cause him to poke the bear in ways that wouldn't be in our interests. It is like poking a bear. Klaidman wanted to know if you thought Putin's rhetoric was over the top. He referred to the Zelensky government as a band of drug addicts and neo-Nazis. These are the opinions of a man. Is there a way to make this kind of rhetoric? What is he doing with that language? I don't know if he really believes his own Kool-Aid about this. We know that they used this rhetoric in the past, and that they sent the Kremlin-backed rebels to help destroy and take over those republics. There was a lot of rhetoric coming out of the Russian Foreign Ministry about the need to defeatneo-Nazis who were committing atrocities. There was a huge fire which was blamed on neo-Nazi groups. We have seen this before. We all know that Zelensky is Jewish, so it really stretches belief that Putin can somehow be convinced of this. The country is being run by neo-Nazis. How can he believe that is beyond me? In answer to one of our earlier questions about the sanctions, you said something. The Chinese are treating Russian bank efforts to conduct transactions in U.S. dollars differently. Three countries abstained from the U.N. Security Council vote. China, India, and the United States of America. Are they possible agents? Is there a chance that we can get out of this through the work of countries like China, India and the United Arab Emirates? I am not sure if Putin would respect anyone from India or the U.S. I believe he has paid close attention to the president. He did not take any military action in Ukraine while China was hosting the Winter Olympics. There have been reports that he was asked to do that. The question is whether the West can rely on President Xi to broker a deal with Putin. The Chinese are very subtle, and they don't like the destabilizations that are happening in the world. The US and the West imposed sanctions on Russia after the annexation of the peninsula. Business continues. In 2016 the U.S. imposed sanctions and kicked out diplomats after Putin interfered in the American presidential election. Business continues. To today, with this invasion. Were there things the United States, the U.K., the West could have done that would have stopped us from getting to this point? The question is the gazillion-dollar question. Everyone wanted to hope for the best. There were many apologists for Putin over the war in Luhansk. The interference in the U.S. election was defended by many apologists. Not in Donald Trump's opinion. I think Putin was banking on a very weak and divided West. He thought he had made inroads into Western society. We all know that the former German chancellor has a salary from three state Russian firms. If I recall correctly, Isikoff makes a lot of money. Yeah, that's right. Acceptance and a willingness to try and understand the actions of Putin has been widespread within German society. You can make a convincing argument for why Putin should be upset with NATO. I think we should understand his grievances over the anti-missile defense shields that are being placed very close to his borders. There is a new one in Poland which is a hundred miles from the Russian border. The Western reaction has been mixed. There has been a lot of acquiescence and apologists for previous actions, but there has also been a certain arrogance and disdain for Putin and Russia. I think that Russia could pose a security threat to the West. There was arrogance. No one listened to his grievances over the missile defense shields. You talk about Putin's grievances. When the Berlin Wall fell and there was a mob outside, we interviewed you about a formative time in your career as a KGB agent. He asked the Soviet unit for help and they said Moscow was silent. It was a kind ofRosebud moment. Yeah, that's right. This had a huge impact on him that has stayed with him for the rest of his life. His description of it in his first interview about this in 2000 was so graphic. He described how he called the Soviet military base to ask for help against the protesters. They said we can't do anything without Moscow. Moscow is silent. He said it was as if we had given up on Europe. I want to thank Catherine for her insights into the enigma of Putin. If you want to understand Putin and his mentality, you should read Catherine's book. Thank you so much for having me on. Do you want to help the people in Ukraine? There are five charities working to bring aid to Ukraine. The leader of the Russian delegation apologized for the invasion of Ukraine at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference. Put your ideas into action with the cloud products and services from Microsoft. A straw poll at the CPAC conservative conference in Florida shows that a majority of attendees want Donald Trump to be the Republican Party's presidential candidate in 2024. At the Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Florida, Ron DeSantis, the closest rival to Trump, received 28% of the votes. CPAC draws from the more conservative wing of the Republican Party, and its polls are not always reliable predictors of the eventual nominee. Putin co-authored a book in 2004 called "Judo: History, Theory, Practice." A senior U.S. intelligence official says that the soviets are expected to send troops to fight alongside the Russians in Ukraine. Russia's war effort has been supported by Belarus, but so far it has not taken part in the conflict. The American official has direct knowledge of current U.S. intelligence assessments and says the decision by the leader of Belarus on whether to join the war depends on talks between Russia and Ukraine. Enjoy this stunning graphics and deep game-play. Alexander Mikheev, the CEO of Russian arms company Rosoboronexport, is said to own a yacht with an estimated value of $8 million. Biden administration officials and Democrat senators are considering a suspension of the federal fuel tax in order to combat record inflation levels ahead of the Federal Reserve's planned rate hikes. The Tax Foundation believes that suspending the fuel tax would be harmful. The Screen Actors Guild Awards celebrated the best acting performances of the year. There are 30 hilarious photos of things that happen only in China. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, protested to her Israeli counterpart over Israel's refusal to join 87 other countries in backing a U.S.-led resolution to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the UN Security Council on Friday. The fence-sitting resulted in criticism from both sides. President Putin ordered Russian nuclear forces to be on high alert on Sunday, while Putin's troops and tanks drove deeper into the country, closing in around the capital. Putin issued a directive to increase the readiness of Russia's nuclear weapons, raising fears that the invasion of Ukraine could lead to a nuclear war. During the Russian invasion, the lawmaker used the plight of the Ukrainians to push her ideology. Take a look at the finest cars of the golden age. CNN footage from inside Russia shows a heavy flamethrower mounted on a T-72 tank. On Sunday, Turkey called Russia's invasion of Ukraine a "war", a rhetorical shift that could pave the way for the NATO member nation to create an international pact limiting Russian naval passage to the Black Sea. Turkey has control over the Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits that connect the Mediterranean and Black seas and can limit the passage of warships during wartime or if threatened. Ankara has said the Russian attack is unacceptable but until Sunday had not described the situation as a war. I am not a Kremlinologist or armchair, but I have seen enough of Vlad and his ilk to have a feel for his M.O. The AirMini AutoSet is the world's smallest CPAP. For a limited time, you can get a free prescription for the AirMini. A translator broke down in tears while interpreting a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a German news outlet. Russia needs to... Russia has said it would attack the Nordic nation if it joined NATO. Moscow has publicly acknowledged that Russian troops have been killed in action in Ukraine, marking the first time the Kremlin has admitted to casualties among its army. The s. Remember that Donald Trump tried to get officials to dig up dirt on the Bidens? A Fox News anchor is accused of presenting a "perfect distillation of white supremacy" in a rant against a Biden supreme court nominee. For too long, our government, our courts, haven't looked like America, according to Biden. If. According to a Caps-Harris poll, Putin would not have ordered troops into Ukraine with Trump in the White House. Biden has been attacked by Republicans for his weakness in the face of autocratic leaders. A majority of Americans think that Vladimir Putin would not have ordered the invasion of Ukraine if Donald Trump was still in the White House.
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