Good morning. Welcome to FCOs today. It's Tuesday, February 22. I'm Nyla Boudou. Here's

what we're watching today. Dropping COVID mandates around the world. Plus, why your next job

interview could be with a robot. But first, today's one big thing. Russia escalates the crisis

with Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered troops into two Russian-backed

separatist regions of Ukraine. Many European and several African countries and the U.S.

have condemned this as a violation of international law and a direct threat to Ukraine's sovereignty.

Axios World Editor Dave Lawler is here to explain all the latest. Good morning, Dave.

Hi, Nyla. Dave, there's been so much focus on Russia invading Ukraine. Has that happened?

It does, in a sense, depend who you ask. Yes, basically, Russian troops are entering Ukrainian

territory, but they have operated in this area before, as you mentioned, they back these separatists

including militarily. For now, they're not moving beyond the territory they've already operated in.

But obviously, this is an extremely dicey situation because they are violating Ukraine's

territorial integrity. They're moving across the border, but they're not moving, let's say,

for the capital key yet at this moment. People are going to be hearing a lot about this Donbass

region today. Dave, what do we need to know about this? So these are two provinces in eastern Ukraine

of Donetsk and Luhansk. Their areas where Russian-backed separatists declared independent republics

in 2014, that's not recognized internationally, and it was not recognized as independent states

by Russia until yesterday. But you do have an issue where the separatists don't control all of the

area that they claim. And so the question is whether Russia will send troops just to the areas

the separatists already have or push beyond that point, in which it really would be a declaration

of war and things could escalate quite quickly. If you ask Vladimir Putin, he would say that these

are areas where you have lots of Russian passport holders, you have people who speak Russian as

...