Russian missile strike targets Kyiv

In the Two Minute Drill, Corey Stutte shares his insights on some of the day's most important geopolitical issues. The excerpts below are taken from the video above.

How bad was the missile attack in Kyiv today?

If you didn't read about this, there was a missile attack on Kyiv today. And there were 13 wounded as of this point that had been found. And six foreign embassies were damaged.

This was a fairly significant attack on Kyiv. It also included several large missiles, and quite a bit of damage was seen within the city. This comes just a day after a GRU cyberattack on the Ministry of Justice in Ukraine. Not a lot of details have been put out there yet, but it's still something that we're paying close attention to as that moves forward.

Why are US officials in Damascus for meetings with Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham?

After the fall of Assad, HTS, or Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, took over the country, and they've been in charge for over a week. What we've seen is a consolidation of power and promises to maintain some social issues. And so I think what the US is actually trying to do is negotiate and ensure that there's some sort of smooth transition for the Syrian government.

We don't know what that's gonna look like, but we want to make sure that the country is in good hands. Things are moving forward. And there are even rumors of discussions of removing sanctions as well as possibly removing HTS from the terrorist organization's lists. So we'll see how that plays out.

While this meeting was taking place around the same time, the US actually conducted an airstrike on ISIS in Eastern Syria. They took out the new ISIS leader as well as one other operative. This also came in line with a statement put out by the foreign minister of Iraq. Which stated that we need to be concerned about ISIS in Syria. They've been able to take a lot of the Assad regime's former weapons, and they are trying to reestablish themselves within the country.