- Just ahead on "Black Issues Forum", a passionate plea and stand for freedom from Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Strong response from President Biden in his first state of the union address and the shadow of racism cast over events and coverage of Ukraine.

Our panel weighs in, stay with us.

[upbeat music] Welcome to "Black Issues Forum", I'm Deborah Holt Noel.

This week following an unforgettable appeal by Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the European Parliament adopted a resolution to work towards granting Ukraine the status of EU candidate country.

Many say it was not only the words of Zelenskyy speech that brought about this move, but the tone of those words and the emotion of the translator.

Zelenskyy spoke not long after he reported two missiles struck Kharkiv, a city in Ukraine filled with universities and students and known as Freedom Square.

- This is called the Freedom Square.

Can you imagine this morning two cruise missiles hit this Freedom Square, dozens of killed ones.

This is the price of freedom.

We are fighting just for our land and for our freedom.

[translator sobbing] Despite the fact that all large cities of our country are now blocked, nobody Is going into enter and intervene with our freedom and country, and believe you me every square of today, no matter what it's called, it's going to be called as today Freedom Square in every city of our country.

Nobody's gonna break us.

We are strong, we are Ukrainians.

- I'd like to welcome this week's panel.

Journalist, Mary C. Curtis of the "Equal Time" podcast, political analyst, Steve Rao, and Dr. Wilmer Leon of "Inside The Issues with Dr. Wilmer Leon on Serious XM."

Opening up with you Mary, I'm sure you heard that speech.

What are your thoughts on his speech and his impact on Biden's subsequent speech?

- Well, of course I think that he was a performer and then he became the head of Ukraine.

And he is, I think exceeding everyone's expectations.

He said, "This is the price of freedom," and it was very emotional.

And when they asked if he wanted to leave the country he said, "I want ammunition not arrive."

And he has really rallied the world around his cause.

And I do think it had an impact on President Joe Biden, both because of course he was gonna talk a lot about many domestic issues in his state of the union, but this was right front and center, and also it's his strong point foreign policy.

You saw a little bit of unity, the ambassador from Ukraine getting innovation, but although there is going to be, I think afterwards some division because we know how our politics play out in this country.

But I do think Zelenskyy has rallied folks and Putin is getting more than he bargained for, I think we have to really talk about that as well.

He was the former head of the KGB, he saw himself going in with power and taking over and that's not the way it's played out.

We've had Biden under his leadership of course, NATO has rallied and there's a lot of European support and I do not think that Putin saw that as well.

- Thank you Mary.

Steve let me pull you in here because here's Ukraine appealing for membership in the EU, but then there's been talk about them wanting membership in NATO as well.

What's the difference?

What can you share with us about that?

- Well, the difference NATO first of all is a military organization.

26 countries that was started after World War II to counter Soviet aggression.

And it includes both European and North Atlantic countries and Western countries obviously like the United States of America.

And its primary mission is when a European member or a member of NATO was attacked that they could be a military kind of intervention to stop that.

We saw NATO for example support the Afghanistan under Obama administration going in to take out Al-Qaeda and there was a stall in the UN Security Council, so that's why you have NATO.

The European Union is 28 European countries.

It's a political and economic and social organization and you have to have membership, but the reason Zelenskyy wants to be in European Union is first economic.

You obviously know the Euro, you'd have trade agreements, but there's a treaty that would be signed that would enable the European countries to defend Ukraine.

Right now Ukraine is a neutral country.

They're not a member of NATO and they're not a member of European Union.

But if he was a member of the EU, then France and Germany and other European countries could come to the defense of Ukraine.

Right now Ukraine is defending Ukraine airspace, they're doing so much but they're doing it alone.

And I'll end with this, I mean I just wanna pick up on what Mary Curtis said, where I draw inspiration and I get very emotional is to look at how hard these Ukrainians are fighting for their freedom and democracy.

That it's something not only they're willing to fight for, but they're willing to die for.

And I think it's an opportunity for us in America to look at that in our democracy, obviously the president did that at The State of The Union.

Now I think resorting back to his international experience as the vice president, as the foreign relations chair when he was in the Senate to rally the nation, to rally the world behind this.

But to answer your question, he's picking EU because he wants to be not in this war alone, he needs the alliance of European members who will defend and fight for Ukraine.

- Dr. Leon, we're all moved by the speech and by the images, but take us back a little bit and what does Putin want?

And why is Ukraine certainly right now they need some help.

So of course they want the NATO, they want EU, but I think goes back more than that basically on what Putin wants out of all of this.

- Well, based upon the speeches that I've heard from Russian president, Putin and the other interviews that he's done and things that he said, what he wants is very simple.

He wants security.

He wants the United States to live up to the agreement that the United States made back in 1991 when the Soviet Union agreed for the reunification of Germany, East and West.

And the United States promised Russia, promised the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand any further eastward then Germany.

And now when you look at a map of Europe, Russia is surrounded by Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria.

These are all NATO countries with US troops, NATO forces, NATO missiles, and Vladimir Putin has been saying very clearly for shoot, 12, 13 years, "We're only gonna let you go so far."

And the United States is using Ukraine as a proxy and he drew the line in the sand and we are where we are.

- Is the US using Ukraine?

- Zelenskyy is a desperate guy.

- I'm sorry, go ahead.

- He's a desperate guy.

He's following the US directive.

Go back to March or May when the United States in Zelenskyy to send troops to the border and Joe Biden wound up having to call Zelenskyy and have those troops withdrawn.

Zelenskyy is following the US narrative the same way the Kurds did when they were encouraged to fight Saddam Hussein and we know what happened to them.

- Let's talk about out the strategy of Putin in surrounding Ukraine.

Some would say in particular folks in our own country and Republicans that this move was smart, that it was savvy.

And in some ways it's a replay, it's typical what he would do.

Looks like he's probably gonna get what he wants.

He surrounded Ukraine, he's going in, and despite the fact that there's a lot of morale and support behind the folks who are fighting, Russia has a stronger army.

What do they get, what do they lose by going in?

- Well of course the Russian military is strong.

They've taken over Kherson the city and Ukraine, and he's rattling that nuclear saber.

But he's also become a pariah on the world stage, whether it's through financial markets, supporting all of those things.

We have countries like Germany that had stayed out of military involvement since World War II offering military aid.

And of course he wanted to weaken NATO which is stronger and we've seen that as well.

So going forward that's something that he has lost, and also we've seen the Russian people are protesting.

- Well, we know that this week President Biden gave his very first State of The Union address and in it he outlined among many other things, current and additional steps that America will take to support Ukraine.

- Together along with our allies, we are right now enforcing powerful economic sanctions.

We're cutting off Russia's largest banks and international financial system, preventing Russia's Central Bank from defending the Russian rebel, making Putin's $630 billion war fund worthless.

[audience clapping] We're choking Russia's access to technology that will sap its economic strength and weaken its military for years to come.

Tonight, I say to the Russian oligarchs and the corrupt leaders who built billions of dollars off this violent regime, no more.

- Dr. Leon, what will these sanctions do and what will they not do?

- What they won't do to Russia is really have a long term dramatic impact on their economy.

What they will do to Europe is make their gas prices higher, make it more expensive for them to get grain because Russia is the largest exporter of grain in the world.

I think they're the number three largest supplier of natural gas and oil.

A couple of things if I could just quickly get to.

If you listen to what Putin has said, he wants to do primarily two things.

He wants to denazify or denatzify Ukraine and he wants to demilitarize the Ukraine.

The United States narrative keeps talking about democracy, democracy, democracy, but the one thing that never gets answered is why did the United States go into the Ukraine in 2014 and overthrow their democratically elected government, and install a pro America government when that was not the government that was elected by the Ukrainian people.

The other thing that Putin is doing is protecting what are known as ethnic Russians in the Donbass region, Luhansk and Donetsk, as they are being attacked and shelled by the Nazi Ukrainian forces from the west.

Again, this isn't being discussed.

In fact, four days before the Russia went in to Ukraine, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe saw 5,667 violations of the Minsk Accord as the Nazis from the west were bombing the people in Luhansk and Donetsk.

So there's a lot of stuff going on here that is just not getting reported because it goes against the dominant Western narrative.

- Well, let's talk about those sanctions though.

And right now, and thank you for that analysis.

[throat clears] But right now the US has said, we're issuing sanctions, we're coming down on the oligarchs, we're gonna try to strangle Russia.

And there is likely to be, as you said, Dr. Leon, a long term impact.

But right now the people of Ukraine are fighting for their nation, they're fighting I guess for their independence and Steve I'd like to ask you, what is the outcome?

What might be the game changing event if Putin is successful?

And I mean, we don't know what's gonna happen right now.

But if he is successful in taking you Ukraine, what does that mean?

- Well Deb, this is the largest invasion of Western Europe since World War II and I love the term you use, game changer.

Because I think what it does if he's successful, it is gonna be the end of what we've known traditionally as the Pax Americana.

You know, after world war II when we founded NATO and the allies were strong to fight for democracy, in the '90s we saw...

The early '90s I was in college at Everett University, the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

And at that time we saw many Eastern European countries become democracies.

It was quite inspiring.

Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Belarus, many of these countries, and we believed it was the triumph that democracy prevailed when President Reagan said, "Tear down that wall, Mr. Gorbachev," and we thought democracy would be here forever with free elections around the world.

So the first game changer is that if he succeeds, he's basically completely destroying that notion of international order.

You know, what would stop another country to go in and invade a weaker country, a dictatorship, an authoritarian country.

It's gonna send a message to China, you can invade Taiwan.

It's gonna send a message to North Korea, you can invade South Korea, but there's always rivals with between India and Pakistan.

So it makes it very dangerous.

So that's the first game changer.

The second thing I would say is that this is all about, when you take away the energy and the gas and the economic sanctions, it's about Imperial Russia.

Vladimir Putin wants to bring back Imperial Russia.

He tried with Crimea, he's issuing cyber attacks on our country, he's interfering on elections, so this will be the first step.

Now, if he succeeds in Ukraine then he's gonna go after other democracies in Russia.

- Thanks Steve, and Mary do you think that the sanctions, and the timing of the sanctions and the announcement are effective or most effective?

It might be like 2020, Hindsight is 2020 at this point.

But in your opinion, at the timing of issuing these sanctions based on the fact that Russian troops were surrounding and building up for weeks, but then later here come sanctions.

What are your thought's about the timing of this?

- Well, as your previous guests have announced, it will have different effects on countries around the world, because so many are dependent on Russia for energy and other things.

And so how much hurt will the world feel from the sanctions that are meant to punish Russia?

So that will have to play out.

And it'll be interesting to see also how this will all play out with domestic politics here in the United States of America.

Because obviously Putin was on the side for Donald Trump win because he wanted to weaken NATO, and he actually was very aligned and is still calling Putin that it was a genius move.

And we'll see right now this country is United, but we already have seen Republicans and Democrats splitting on the cause of this and who's to blame, and we saw in the previous administration that he tried to punish Ukraine and not give them military aid.

And so what's gonna happen in 2022 in the 2024 elections will have a lot of effect on our posture toward these other countries.

We've even seen at a lot of conservative meetings this past weekend, the America First Political Action Committee, they were cheering for Putin.

So, this is just the beginning of how, whether it's sanctions or politics, what effect it will have.

- Well, the unifying effect of all of this is now in question as you just pretty much outlined and there's talk about freedom and democracy, but even in global affairs, there's the specter of suspected racism.

Emerging this week was news about African and Indian students being held back while Ukrainians were allowed to leave at the border.

And in addition in the Twitterverse, users called out a CBS reporter for his bias language in his reporting.

So let me just start with you Steve, do you think that these are examples of racial discrimination or bias?

- Yeah, I mean I think there is.

We've talked about it in the show, there's always racial bias.

Just making assumptions that because it's a more of a European country when I read those tweets, a white European country, there are people of color in Ukraine, but just this notion that well, they're being invaded and that's a really, really bad thing.

Whereas if you were a country that's a country of color, it's gonna be okay for you to have strife and warfare and things like that.

So I could read into it.

I don't know whether it was intended as racist, but I do think that when you read these stories and you read these statements, you can really read between the lines and sort of imply that's a racial bias.

So, that's my opinion on it.

And I hope that we can use this as an opportunity to fight for all Ukrainians, regardless of their color of their skin that they can be free.

- Well, the video and the stories are just remarkable.

I mean, I think you can look at it two ways, but I won't take up the time, I'd love to get your feedback on it, Dr. Leon.

- I think Steve is right.

Again, I keep going back to, you've got a lot of Nazis in very powerful positions in the Ukrainian government, and we know that they're racist.

And so it doesn't surprise me that you would see the preference being given to white Ukrainians.

I have to push back on a couple of things.

One, there's a dominant narrative that the world is United.

That's just not true.

Israel for example has not backed the resolution in the UN condemning Russia.

There's not one Muslim country that has backed the UN resolution.

You've got Poland, Bulgaria and Slovakia that are not sending, and these are EU countries, that are not sending fighter planes, MiG fire planes to Ukraine.

So there it's not as dominant of a wave of support as the United States is making it out to be.

And in terms of Putin giving the message that it's okay to invade countries, I think the United States sent that message when it in invaded Afghanistan.

I think the United States gave that message when it invaded Syria.

I think the United States gave that message when they murdered Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

And we of course can't forget what we did to Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

And by the way, Putin isn't trying to take over Ukraine.

If he wanted to do that, it would've been done three or four days ago.

- So what is he trying to do if he's not trying to take over Ukraine.

- He's trying to demilitarize and denatzify the country.

- And in the process is invading and destroying civilian locations and civilians are dying along the way, being killed along the way and the accusation that the Ukraine is run by Nazis, that's debatable and it's also hard to understand-- - No, I didn't say it was run by Nazis.

I didn't say it was run by Nazis.

What I said is there's a very strong Nazi contingent called the Azov brigade in Ukraine that the United States through the CIA has been funding, training and used in 2014 to overthrow the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych.

- Let me pull Maryanne here.

- Yeah, I just wanted to kind of get a comment that brought together your last question about how this conflict is playing out when it comes to race and how the media is covering it.

Because I do think it's great all the time for media to look at how it frames stories.

And as Dr.

Lean said, how we frame invasions in other countries and refugees and migrants coming from other countries that are black and brown and how we're looking at the Ukrainians and those refugees.

And you can see it's very clear because people are referring to civilized countries and uncivilized countries, and people are rightly calling out the coverage of it.

Yes, it might be natural to relate to certain kind of people if you are a journalist, but you have to look at that framing and critique.

And one journalist even said, "I have to watch what I say."

And then he said something that was framed in a way that seemed racist.

And so I think this is a good chance to do that because journalists do cover different invasions, different refugees, different migrants.

I've seen so many stories now with children and mothers and you don't see that kind of coverage in that broad way when you're talking about people from middle Eastern countries, from African countries.

- Very interesting, very interesting.

And I think also what's interesting is just the fact that people are asking questions and doing more research to try to find out.

I mean, I certainly have become more interested in what's going on there right now, but what led to this.

And, Steve I wanna give you the last maybe one minute here, because this could be a very game changing episode going forward and hopefully the sanctions work, but the the Ukrainian people are asking for a different kind of help right now.

- Yeah, well I think looking at we need to help the people of Ukraine.

The European Union membership I think would help.

Obviously NATO's not gonna happen, but getting other countries to help them.

Because they're doing everything they can right now to defend their airspace.

I think Putin will eventually, if not already go after civilian areas as he did in Chechnya and other areas.

So I think thats the answer at the end of the day.

And I'll end with this.

I think this does pose an opportunity for President Biden to get back to his foreign affairs experience as the commander in chief, both as vice president, the president of the United States and as the us Senator when he led the foreign relations committee to really focus outward now.

And I do think that's the one thing I'm an optimist.

And I do think that one thing that hasn't gone well for Putin is, he had two objectives.

To weaken Ukraine and to weaken NATO.

- [Debra] Five second Steve.

[Debra laughing] - But NATO was strong than it's ever been as Condoleezza Rice said.

They're more mobilized than they've ever been before so that valley Putin has actually unified NATO the likes we haven't seen since World War II.

- Steve Rao, thank you for your insights.

Dr. Wilmer Leon, Mary C. Curtis, we appreciate your commentary, given us a lot to think about and talk about in today's program, thanks so much.

- Thank you, pleasure.

- Thank you.

- My pleasure.

- I wanna thank today's guest for joining us today, and we invite you to engage with us on Twitter or Instagram using the #blackissuesforum.

You can also find our full episodes on pbsnc.org/blackissuesforum, or listen at any time on Apple iTune, Spotify, or Google podcast.

For "Black Issues Forum" I'm Debra Holt Noel, thanks for watching.

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