Good morning, good morning, everybody. It is Thursday, March 3rd, and there's a lot going on in the world. Welcome to our weekly debrief where we take a little time to look at the news over coffee, hopefully with friends, to dig a little deeper on some of the headlines that you're likely seeing throughout this week. And here we are a week really into the war in Ukraine.

Last week, we were even struggling to really understand what is the right words to use.

The words really matter. You know, is it an invasion? Is it an attack? Is it a war? What constitutes

all of this? How do you define it? And so I'm going to call it a war because that's what we're seeing on the ground.

This is what we're seeing in the ground in Ukraine, a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Russia is calling it a special operation.

And one of the things I learned in my reporting this week is that apparently on the Russian search engine, so we

have Google, obviously, here in the United States and others that you can use, but apparently

the word war, you're not able to actually look up. You're not able to actually use that term

to describe what's happening in Ukraine. It's a special operation. I relied on that information

from author and journalist David Satter, who we talked to for the first time last week. We have

a second interview with him coming up that will be released tomorrow, where we dig even deeper.

And one of the reasons why I really like to talk to David is not just because of his

experience working in the Soviet Union and watching the collapse of it, working throughout the Cold War, but is also because of his language. He speaks and reads and writes in Russian. I don't do that. And quite frankly, probably a lot of people that you're watching reporting on the news right now do not. And it's really important to break down some of those language barriers to know what's happening. So he shared that with me. I thought that was an

interesting fact. What I thought we would do today is take some of your questions, but also take

what would seem like simple storylines and pull on these threads a little bit and unravel how

very simple things can really impact the story moving forward.

The big news this morning is that it seems at this point, and quite frankly information

has been back and forth on this for the past 12 hours, a city in the south of Ukraine

has fallen.

That would be the first city to fall to Russian forces.

And the name of that city is Kursan. Several of you have asked about that. Amy, you are asking,

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