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Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway. Now, today is going to be an ordinary day for most American families. Some folks are going to have great joys and others deep sorrows, but for most, this day will be much like so many that have come before and many that will follow. That is not what today will be for the people of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin's decision to launch an unprovoked full-scale military attack on Ukraine has disrupted every region and every household in the country.

Some citizens in the capital of Kyiv huddle together in bomb shelters, others, civilians, have taken up arms, prepared to defend their cities from the advancing Russian army. On Friday morning, the US indicated that Ukraine's capital could fall in a matter of days. At the same time, across Europe and even in Moscow, citizens have taken to the streets to openly protest this naked aggression.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Thousands of Russians marched on Thursday chanting, "No to war." On Thursday, President Biden announced another slate of sanctions against Russia, and vowed to "Hold Russia accountable for the attacks."

President Biden: The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine, without provocation, without justification, without necessity. This is a premeditated attack.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The president announced sanctions on four Russia's largest banks in addition to two financial institutions the US sanctioned earlier this week. The US and allies will also be imposing new export controls on Russia and hitting Russian elites with sanctions.

President Biden: Putin is the aggressor, Putin chose this war, and now he and his country will bear the consequences.

Melissa Harris-Perry: President Biden and NATO are now mapping out what comes next. Though the president has continued to emphasize that US forces will not be going to fight in Ukraine. We talked with Paul McLeary, defense reporter at POLITICO on Friday morning. I must say, I am moved by what I'm seeing in terms of ordinary people in Ukraine experiencing something so shocking, so unbelievable, trying to defend themselves, but the Russian troops are an overwhelming force, is that right?

Paul McLeary: The Ukrainian military is better equipped and larger than it was in 2014 during a Russia's initial invasion, but the Russian military has spent the past decade-plus pumping money into their military. They are a world-class force taking on a smaller force that has the will to fight and has better equipment but still in the end won't be much of a match. A lot of the Ukrainian equipment is still Soviet era. They have US and British anti-armor and some anti-air capabilities, but that can only go so far.

The Russians are coming from the south, coming from the west, and two points in the north toward Kyiv in a pincer movement. It is overwhelming, and there's still tens of thousands of Russian troops in reserve along the borders that will likely move in today and over the next several days.

Melissa Harris-Perry: At this point, President Biden is saying no US troop involvement, or at least on Friday, this is what the Biden Administration was saying, which means that sanctions are the primary tool at play here. Talk to us about these new sanctions. On Thursday, President Biden did really try to sell that these sanctions are different than what we've seen in the past, and that they will be more painful, both to Putin and to the nation, to Russia.

Paul McLeary: Yes, they are pretty sweeping set of sanctions that go further than what we saw in 2014, or even over the last several years as Russia has carpet-bombed cities in Syria, like Idlib and places like that. They hit the banking sector pretty hard. Some of Russia's largest banks, prohibiting those banks from raising capital in the United States, prohibiting exports to Russia of dual-use technologies. Things like semiconductors, things that can be used in both the civilian and military sector.

It will take some time. It's not going to be immediate, but it would eventually really start to hit the Russian manufacturing sector and the Russian military and its modernization efforts in the coming months and years, if the sanctions hold.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Ukraine is not part of NATO, not in the Alliance. In the conversations that we've been having in recent weeks, one refrain that we've heard is this may be horrible to see, it may be sad, it may be quite awful for the people of Ukraine, but this is not America's war. I've heard that repeatedly. There's another line that says, this really matters because Ukraine will not be the last, that you'll see an advancing of Russian troops into Ukraine's neighbors to the west.

Based on what we're seeing right now, is there a sense about the military interests of the US, the security interests of the US and of NATO relative to what's happening right now in Ukraine?

Paul McLeary: Absolutely. President Biden has sent 12,000 more US troops to Europe over the past three weeks or so. He announced 7,000 yesterday as part of that. The UK is sending more troops to Poland and to Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. Canada is sending more troops. France is sending more troops. Putin said what he does not want is a strong NATO presence on his border, but that's exactly what he's getting by invading Ukraine.

The United States sent F-35s to the Baltic nations in the last few days. The US military is training with the polls right along the border in Poland. NATO has said they're not going to go into Ukraine, and I believe they won't, but they are definitely beefing up right along that border, of Belarus of Ukraine, then Russia and the North. Moldova just on the west of Ukraine is surely looking at this situation with great interest because if the Russian military does keep going, Moldova would probably be next in their sites.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is such an important point, I feel like, that Putin is saying, "I don't want a NATO presence on my doorstep," and therefore this was the push to get NATO to say that Ukraine could never join the Alliance. Obviously, if Russia effectively moves its own border by pushing west through Ukraine, then it actually ends up bumping up against these strong NATO allies.

In that circumstance, are the sanctions that have currently been announced by President Biden and by other NATO allies, are they enough to starve them? I don't mean starve the people, but starve the resources necessary to continue to advance. Can the sanctions work that quickly, or will the Russian military defenses still have plenty of resources left to keep moving west of Ukraine?

Paul McLeary: The sanctions won't have any practical effect in the coming weeks, really, or probably even months, but in the long term, if they hold, they'll be pretty damaging. The Russian energy sector was largely left out of the sanctions package other than the Nord Stream 2 cancellation. President Biden said yesterday, damaging the US economy is a red line for him. For now, the energy sector has been spared, but Russia, they have plenty of ready reserves. They have plenty of money held in reserve in order to keep funding the military.

This operation that Putin has launched, he's had 150,000 troops on the border, essentially deployed in Belarus and in Western Russia for several weeks, if not several months. These troops are now fighting. That creates a lot of wear and tear on the troops themselves and on their equipment. Once this is over, once the Ukraine fight is over, whenever that might be, there's going to be a lot of reset and rest and refit. That costs money and that takes time.

Russia having the ability or the will to keep pushing will be called into question, and we'll see how this turns out in the coming days and weeks if an insurgency does start in Ukraine and they find themselves involved in a grinding insurgency where they're losing troops, losing vehicles, losing helicopters. There's a lot of unanswered questions, but this move is a gamble by Putin, and it is going to affect the military then. Even if they don't lose a lot of troops, equipment is worn out and the troops themselves will be pretty worn out at the end of this.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We've talked about out sanctions, we've talked about holding a line once you get to NATO nations. Of course, the other piece is the US and other NATO allies supplying Ukrainian troops. You've talked a little bit about how since that war of dignity, the Crimea invasion in 2014, we have seen an improvement and upscaling of the Ukrainian military. Again, is there time and capacity for the US and other nations to supply sufficient resistance resources to Ukraine's military?

Paul McLeary: That's the big question of the moment. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a European diplomat and I asked, "What is the timeframe here for supplying Ukraine with a weapons it needs to defend itself?" He said, "Two years ago." The Stingers and the Javelins and the other arms the west has sent rushed in there over the past few months. It's not too little too late, but it can only do so much.

If the government falls and the country is occupied, Pentagon officials have suggested that they are looking into ways to train and equip Ukrainian forces outside of Ukraine. It's not clear how that would happen, how they would get them out, how they would get them back in. Right now, Ukraine has mostly lost control of its airspace. It's lost control of a lot of its ground lines of communication. There's not a great way to get anything in right now. NATO planes are not going to fly over Ukrainian airspace.

Russians have S-400 ground-to-air systems in Belarus and Ukraine that can range hundreds of miles and knock things out of the sky. There won't be any major resupply effort happening right now in Ukraine. In the coming months, if something can happen outside of the country and get it back in is another question, but that's in the early stages and very speculative and very dangerous.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can we talk about citizen populations for a moment? Often in circumstances like this in other parts of the world, a moment like this is the initiation of a refugee crisis as people will seek to depart a state that is falling to an outside military force. Do we know anything about the capacity of, again, Eastern European nations to receive Ukrainians who may seek to leave Ukraine and find safety?

Paul McLeary: Yes, this will be mostly on Poland and Hungary as they border Ukraine, probably mostly Poland. We've seen some refugees coming out, I think, Thursday and Friday. There hasn't been a flood, but if things get worse and the fighting gets worse, particularly in the west, that will increase.

I was speaking to some US military officials over the past few days about the 82nd Airborne in Poland, that they were going to do some of this humanitarian work. It appears that they seem to think that the Polish government and the EU can handle that humanitarian work. The US troops there for now will focus on training with the Polish military. Poland and the EU can handle it up to a point. It depends on how large the flood becomes and people are let back into the country, but it could get pretty grim if there's bottlenecks at the border, people can't get through or if they strain capacity.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Are you surprised that Russian citizens, knowing the risks of speaking out openly against government action, actually took to the streets chanting, saying, "No war"? Will that have any effect on decision-makers in Moscow?

Paul McLeary: Yes, the demonstrations in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, in other cities were pretty large and it was somehow surprising. Putin has spent the last several years systematically crushing domestic dissent, killing journalists, arresting journalists, arresting activists, but it's clear that that resentment and that will to resist still exists in Russia.

The fighting has been pretty intense in Ukraine and we don't know the casualty figures yet, but if Russian soldiers do start coming home in numbers in body bags or just not coming back home, there's reports earlier this week that Russian military had sent mobile crematoriums to the front, essentially to premade soldiers and hide their casualty figures. If things like that start happening, as happened in Grozny, there will be some pretty serious domestic dissent.

That was one of the big issues in the war in Chechnya, when Russian soldiers essentially just stopped coming home because the Russian military was not admitting that they were being killed. That created a wide scale descent. I think now, after Navalny was jailed and there is more of a domestic resistance to Putin, the protest could spread and it could get pretty serious.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Paul McLeary is a defense reporter at POLITICO. Paul, thank you so much for joining us.

Paul McLeary: Thank you very much.

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