Good morning. Welcome to Smarter News and this week's debrief. I'm Jenna and I'm glad you're here as we take a deep breath and take a look at some of the big headlines of the week. We're all about quick and concise, nonpartisan information, but we also need a little time just to kind of dig into some of our big news topics. So we have the appropriate context and we understand why these news stories matter.

And then as we're getting updates, we're better able to understand why some of these updates are really relevant.

We're really excited today because Holly McKay is going to be joining us.

Holly, as you know, is a journalist, writer, author, and she recently returned from Ukraine.

And particularly from an area where there's a lot of attention focus where you're seeing Russian forces and Ukrainian forces in really close

proximity. And we have news on that today. One of the interesting things about being a journalist

is oftentimes you cannot anticipate how different news stories intersect. And if you think that you're hearing a lot

about Russia these days, you are. I mean, how could we anticipate this news cycle where we would

be talking about Russia related to figure skating in the Olympics and a potential armed conflict

in Eastern Europe? However, there are some patterns. You know, if you're looking at these

all as tributaries, right, to a major story or a major stream of themes of thought, there are

some similarities in these stories, some repeat behaviors, some things that we can't explore.

So what I want to do real quick is catch you up on where we have seen the story about Russia, Ukraine, the

U.S. and NATO develop over the last week. We have some really important U.S. officials in

different parts of the world and traveling today. So we want to make sure we know what's going

on there. And then we also have a couple of these other stories, again, when it comes to figure

skating or also a special counsel investigation that is again tied to Russia loosely. And we want to just, I just want to catch you up on those things. You know, it's funny, I had this whole plan last night, you know, whole plan of how this live was going to go, how this debrief this week was going to go, how we were going to dig into these topics. I wake up this morning and things have changed. That gives you an idea of how quickly the news is moving. So first

things first, let's just talk about a couple key developments in what's going on with Russia, Ukraine,

the United States. So when we started this week, something I didn't talk to a lot about,

were a series of reports talking about a move towards

diplomacy, that there seems to be a willingness by Russia to talk and to continue diplomacy and

dialogue. And what I was looking for were the facts to actually back that up. But that's some of the

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