captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this edition for saturday, february 26: ukraine fights back, as the russian invasion continues. and, mining a homegrown metal for energy efficiency, to supercharge the economy in the united kingdom. next, on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: sue and edgar wachenheim iii. bernard and denise schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family. the anderson family fund. the estate of worthington mayo-smith. leonard and norma klorfine. the rosalind p. walter foundation. koo and patricia yuen,

committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities. barbara hope zuckerberg. we try to live in the moment, to not miss what's right in front of us. at mutual of america, we believe taking care of tomorrow can help you make the most of today. mutual of america financial group: retirement services and investments. >> for 25 years, consumer cellular's goal has been to provide wireless service that helps people communicate and connect. we offer a variety of no-contract plans, and our u.s.-based customer service team can help find one that fits you. to learn more, visit www.consumercellular.tv. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the american people. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thank you for joining us. fierce fighting on day three of the russian insion of ukraine.

ukrainians kept control of their capital city of kyiv, civilians took up arms, and many thousands fled to neighboring countries. ( explosions ) on the outskirts of kyiv, a missile hit a high-rise residential building, where firefighters said at least six were injured and 80 people were evacuated. the mayor of kyiv extended the city's curfew from 5:00 p.m. until 8:00 a.m. this morning, president volodymyr zelensky recorded more videos, vowing that ukrainians will continue to fight. >> ( translated ): we will not lay down our weapons. we will defend our state. our weapons are our strength. this is our land. our country. our children. we will protect all of them. >> sreenivasan: zelensky also reportedly turned down a u.s. offer to help him evacuate, saying, ”i need ammunition, not a ride.” the subway systems in several cities are now being used as shelters, and many residents

are taking cover in basements and garages. ukraine's health minister reported today that 198 people have been killed, and at least 1,000 have been wounded. it wasn't clear how many were civilians, but the statement said 33 children were wounded and three killed. in the u.s., secretary of state antony blinken announced authorization of "up to $350 million for immediate support to ukraine's defense.” this brings the total to more than $1 billion in security funding from the u.s. over the past year. the u.n. refugee agency reported that so far, at least 150,000 people have fled ukraine to neighboring countries, including poland, hungary, moldova, and romania. most people leaving were women and children. ukraine has banned men ages 18 to 60 from leaving the country who could be conscripted to the army. it was unclear how much territory russian forc now control, but britain's ministry of defense said today that the speed of the russian advance slowed temporarily-- which it

said was likely caused by both logistical difficulties and strong ukrainian resistance. >> sreenivasan: npr correspondent frank langfitt is in ukraine, covering the russian invasion. he joined us early this afternoon for re on the situation there. frank, we've seen images of you sitting in a bomb shelter, doing your reporting. where are you standing now? >> we're in western ukraine, and what you're seeing is a mass exodus, really, from the country because of all the fighting in the east. and already, the estimates are over 120,000 people have already fled the country. and the estimates, even before the war began was, this could be a refugee crisis of a million to a million and a half. moldova has just declared a national emergency. they have 26,000 people. and so, very sadly, i think, you're just going to see more anre of this as the fighting increases. and keep in mind, the troops, the 190,000 troops we've been talking about on the borders of ukraine, the russian troops-- only half of them have been

deployed so far. so we expect there will be other attacks from other directions. >> sreenivasan: what about the people in kyiv that you were reporting around? people who are deciding to sleep in subway stations and bomb shelters and basements? >> it's-- i think that it's been terrifying for many of them. you know, when you and i last talked, which is just a week ago, i was downtown in kyiv and it was a lovely evening and people were out at restaurants; and now it's a war zone. i talked to one parliamentarian and i said, how are things in your neighborhood? and she said, "i just had armored helicopters fly past my-- you know, fly past my window." there's another woman we know who spent the entire night in a bomb shelter, but she doesn't want to leave because her mother's there and her mother doesn't want to leave. and this is a story that we're hearing all across the country now. last night, as we were in central ukraine, we spent probably three or four times in a bomb shelter after, you know, we heard the air raid sirens, with local people, the

ones who hadn't fled-- fled yet. >> sreenivasan: frank, what's factoring into people's decisions to stay or leave? >> well, i think many families are deciding to get out because they-- now that they realize there is absolutely an invasion here, the fear is, it could be an absolute full-scale invasion, and they're just really afra for their safety. but what you're also seeing is men comingnd volunteering to fight with the territorial defense forces. and so we've seen, as we've been driving hundreds of miles across the country, we've seen people showing up at community centers and being divided into units and going off to get their weapons to go back to kyiv and fight at the front. and that's been a sort of an extraordinary thing to see, but you're seeing it in villages really all across the country here. >> sreenivasan: frank, what's the information flow-- how are people staying connected? is the internet working? are radio stations broadcasting information? how do people stay aware of what's happening? >> it's been extraordinary, hari. i thought that communications and electricity would go out at the beginning of the attack.

it has not happened. we've actually done all of our conversations on npr using my iphone and a little bit of-- so, a little bit of technology, but not very much. everybody is on the internet, for the most part. it does come and go, but people are communicating. many people in kyiv are letting people know what's happening by posting lots of videos and showing how apartment blocks are being hit and the damage that's being done already to some civilian areas. >> sreenivasan: npr's frank langfitt joining us from western ukraine, thas so much. >> good to talk, hari. >> sreenivasan: for more on russia's invasion of ukraine, and additional national and international news, visit www.pbs.org/newshour. >> sreenivasan: newshour weekend special correspondent simon ostrovsky has been covering ukraine for years. in 2019, he caught up with then- presidential candidate volodymyr zelensky, and asked about his foreign policy with russia. >> reporter: you're an actor, with no political experience.

>> yes. >> reporter: your country is at war with russia. >> yes. >> reporter: vladimir putin, 20 years at the helm. how are you going to deal with vladimir putin? >> ( translated ): first of all, we will do everything to make sure that vladimir putin never ends up at the helm of our country. the main problem in our relationship with russia is the war. no one has a real answer, how to stop putin. all we can do is continue talks, to achieve a ceasefire. >> sreenivasan: simon ostrovsky joined me earlier today for more on the current russian invasion. i wonder what you think now of president zelensky, who is going out of his way to make sure that his people know that he is not fleein that he is staying put, and he plans to fight? i mean, you've got the mayor of kyiv also doing the same. what is the message that that is sending? does thaconvince people on the ground? >> reporter: well, you saw from the clip that zelensky, when he was still a candidate to be president, counted on the

international community to rally to his side and help him in dealing with vladimir putin. and the messages that we've seen him putting out in these days is that "we are on our own. it is up to us to fight for our own survival." and soi think it's a 180-degree turn, at least in the messaging that we've seen, in this man, as he's been president for several years and realized that it was up to ukrainians to save themselves. and that's not to say that the international community isn't providing material assistance to ukraine-- they are, money and arms. but the fighting is being done by ukrainians, and by ukrainians alone. and i don't think that anybody expected that he would be ukraine's wartime president in an era very reminiscent of 1939,

a massive land war on the european continent. >> sreenivasan: i know you reported from the donbas region before, where, again, most americans are just waking up to the fact that there had been a hot war going on for the past eight years. when you saw the movements of russia around, into those two regions, what were the people that you had met with there telling you, about how quickly this was happening? >> reporter: well, ukraine has had eight years to prepare for what's going on now. and the situation was, of course, very, very different. in 2014 and in 2015, when the war initially began, it had a military that had essentially been dismantled and was decrepit and that hadot been maintained under the pro-russia government of viktor yanukovych. and so, yoknow, we saw in those days, in the initial stages, the defense is melting away and there were a lot of people on the ground who just

didn't believe in the possibility that ukraine could defend itself against russia. and so, especially in those eastern regions, you saw a lot of people-- and in crimea, of course-- you saw a lot of people switching sides, simply out of self-preservation. these days, i think ukrainians have a lot more confidence in themselves and their country and their gornment, and attitudes have really changed. so, you know, if putin's idea in 2014 was to break up ukraine as a country and destabilize it, then he's got the opposite result from his intervention, which is an increase in patriotism and national identity. i think the opposite of, essentially, his nightmare scenario. >> sreenivasan: you know, at the time when you were reporting several years o, you were kidnapped by pro-russian militia forces. and i wonder what you learned from the people who were kind of in detention or imprisoned with you at the time. people w were fighting against, well, that side of the

war. >> reporter: i was actually kidnapped by a group of militants that were led by a russian citizen named igor geen, a former f.s.b. officer who had orchestrated the takeover of the town that i was reporting from, when i was taken captive. and when they detained me and threw me in the basement, there were other civilians down there: bloggers, a streamer, a journalist, a nationalist ukrainian who had actually come to the region to fight. i was fortunately released after being held for just three days, because there was a lot of international outcry about my kidnapping. a lot of the media who were in the area wervery vocal about my case. but the other men who were down there with me ended up spending months in detention, in those terrible conditions, until their

city was retaken by ukrainian forces. but obviously, not all the territory was retaken by ukrainian forces, and so many people, including journalists and human rights workers, ende up spending years in dark prisons in the areas controlled by the so-called donetsk and luhansk people's republics. >> sreenivasan: simon, you've also reported extensively on misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and how they work, especially in this region. in the last week or so, have you seen an uptick in how propaganda is kind of being hurled by the russian side, or how people are projecting what's happening on the ground? >> reporter: yeah. just this morning, you know, there were very controversial reports about what the source of that attack on the residential building was. you had the ukinian authorities saying that this was a russian rocket that hit a

civilian residence; and you had the russian side saying that this was a misfired sam, surface-to-air missile, from the ukrainian side that had been trying tshoot down a russian rocket, and it went off-course and hit the building. so, you know, in the fog of war, it's very hard to verify exactly what's happening, especially from a distance. but we've seen, especially in the lead-up to this campaign, the russians going full bore in trying to claim that it was the ukrainians who had instigated this war, and that it was in response to those attacks that russia invaded. but it seems pretty ridiculous just from a logical standpoint to think that the ukrainians would choose the time when russia had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of soldiers around its borders, to launch a counterattack in the donbas. that just seems silly. noneeless, the russians are also the ones who are claiming that not a single russian soldier has died in the conflict yet, so it's not entirely

surprising. >> sreenivasan: simon ostrovsky, thanks so much. >> reporter: thanks for having me. >> sreenivasan: as governments around the world race to reach new emissions targets in the wake of last fall's u.n. climate summit in belfast, hundreds of companies are focused on electrifying economies, particularly the transportation sector. in the united kingdom, as newshour weekend scial correspondent willem marx reports, government support is helping develop a domestic electric battery industry, by mining a homegrown metal. >> reporter: robin kelly just loves looking for the right variety of rock. he's spent a decade hunting gold, copper, and zinc across africa, but these days, works a little closer to home, in windswept cornwall, england, where he's the chief geologist at a british business focused on

a metal called lithium. >> you have this-- this body of lithium-mica granite. there's a lot of variation within that. and we've spent all these years conducting exploration work to really understand that. so we're now at the point where we believe we have an economic body of lithium-mica granite. >> reporter: this rock type, called “lithium-mica granite,” contains less than 1% lithium. but it still makes economic sense to extract it, because lithium isow a crucial component in the race to electrify our world, and its price is soaring. so, this looks like it could be on my kitchen cabinet, b actually, in here, is the lithium we need for electric cars? >> yes, exactly. just contained within these tiny minerals. >> reporter: andrew smith runs this business, called-- well, british lithium. the metal is certainly not unique to cornwall, but he says his team's extraction technique is. >> lithium is not rare. there are many occurrences. but what we need to do is translate that into a final product, so there's a number of chemical stages that we've got to go through. >> reporter: an international

group of scientists, including kateryna omelchuk from ukraine, are using heat, electricity, quick lime, and water to extract the lithium, without requiring any new mitigation measures to protect the local environment. these researchers are rehearsing the extraction process at this mini-refinery, for what they hope will soon be a much larger project, driven by global demand for better batteries. >> now we want something bigger, larger, quicker, stronger, like, with more performance. so we have to work on this. >> reporter: a british government innovation fund has already invested almost $4 million here. but smith wants even more u.k. focus on mining metals. >> you know, if we were to transition our economy away from hydrocarbons, to electric vehicles, we're going to need those raw ingredients. and if we can source them domestically, i think that should be part of government policy, and enabling us to do that in an economic way. >> reporter: mines have played a

big part in cornwall's social and industrial history for thousands of years, providing livelihoods for thousands of locals. but in recent decades, as demand for other mined materials here has fallen, much of the digging has stopped. but thanks to transformational technologies, these old hills and hollows could offer new economic opportunities for the community, and help the u.k. end its reliance on countries like china, which control most of the world's lithium market. >> there's no doubt that the potential of lithium extraction has the potential of creating the well-paid jobs that cornwall really, desperately needs now. >> reporter: steve double is a member of parliament, representing cornwall's historic mining region. >> both brexit, but also the pandemic, has really put a spotlight on supply chains and some of the fragility th there is in our supply chains. and also, how we are so heavily-dependent on one part of the world. there's more to do for the government to get behind this

emerging industry and really back it, so that we can reach the potential that there is clearly there-- both in terms of job creation and growing our economy, but also just putting the u.k. in a much more secure position, in terms of the supply chain. >> reporter: the lithium to be mined here in cornwall will be helping power the ongoing electric transportation revolution. but it won't just necessarily end up inside car batteries. trains like this one will soon be powered by lithium-ion batteries, too. government zero emissions targets mean mass transit must go green, too, and train-maker hitachi will be trialing electric engines on this london-to-cornwall route later this year. >> from an engineering organization's perspective, what a challenge-- what a fantastic opportunity to drive towards. >> reporter: jim brewin heads up hitachi's u.k. office. >> and this is why, when government sets targets like that, like we're seeing in the u.k., in japan, in the u.s., these really change how we look

at what we need to offer to society through the work that we do, and batteries, the one step forward, and the trials that we're doing here, can be a glal offering. >> reporter: brewin says selecting local suppliers can also decarbonize production, so behind hitachi's worldwide trains, the battery technology will be british, developed here in the old industrial heartland of england's northeast. the new train batteries will rely on the same lithium-ion technology as cars, but with very different power requirements. >> a car has possibly part of one of these battery units, whereas we've got 16 battery unit, so it scales by volume. strip everything back down. >> reporter: sarah foster is a project manager at the british firm hitachi has hired to engineer these new batteries. >> and that was what we talked about yesterday. >> reporter: she's overseeing the development of these vast locomotive power systems. >> we start off slowly, with two trial trains on two different networks, which are quite hard networks to run on.

but then once we've proven that, we'll be able-- it'll take off. >> to run the testing. yeah, yeah. >> reporter: chris pennison runs this battery-building business, once called hyperdrive. it's now owned by an american company, turntide, with backing from billionaires including bill gates, jeff bezos, and michael bloomberg, as well as the u.k.'s innovation agency. >> i get exceptional support from all of the local government, central government's really, backing what we're doing. and not just what we're doing, but the whole electrification sector. >> reporter: the battery systems here end up in everything, from cherry pickers to construction machines, and sold around the world. but pennisons britain needs to prioritize this battery revolution. >> we need to make sure that we're ahead of the competitors, the other countries. we have to make sure that we can attract talent with what we're doing and how we're doing it. but we also ne to know, if we're going play in that arena, we have to support the change that the country has to go through, and the world's

changing. >> sreenivasan: that's all for this edition of pbs newshour weekend. for the latest news updates, visit www.pbs.org/newshour. i'm hari sreenivasan. thanks for watching. stay healthy, and have a good night. captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: sue and edgar wachenheim iii. bernard and denise schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family.

the anderson family fund. the estate of worthington mayo-smith. leonard and norma klorfine. the rosalind p. walter foundation. koo and patricia yuen, committed to bridgincultural differences in our communities. barbara hope zuckerberg. we try to live in the moment, to not miss what's right in front of us. at mutual of america, we believe taking care of tomorrow can help you make the most of today. mutual of america financial group: retirement services and investments. additional support has been provided by: consumer cellular. and by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the american people. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like

you. thank you. you're watching pbs.

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