Return to Transcripts main page

CNN News Central

Ukraine: Drone Strikes Deal Blow to Russia, Destroy Dozens of Warplanes; Current No-Hire, No-Fire Job Market is Major Hurdle for New Grads; Business Owners Confront Masked Agents Detaining Gardener. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired June 02, 2025 - 13:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[13:30:00]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: We're getting new details on this stunning surprise attack that Ukraine just pulled off in Russian territory. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying that his country's attack on several Russian airbases seriously weakened the Kremlin's military. He says that the operation dubbed Spiderweb took more than a year to implement and destroyed dozens of the Kremlin's warplanes.

About a third of their strategic bomber aircraft were destroyed, we're told. According to the country's security chief, more than 100 drones were smuggled inside Russian territory, giving Ukraine the ability to hit targets thousands of miles from the front lines, causing an estimated $7 billion in damage.

ERICA HILL, CNN HOST: And of course, the timing is interesting here. There's attacks coming on the eve of peace talks in Turkey, attended by delegations from both countries. The face-to-face meeting, though, was a quick one, lasting just over an hour today.

CNN military analyst, retired Air Force Colonel Cedric Leighton joins us now. When we talk about this surprise, stunning move by Ukraine, do you think in some ways not only Russia may have underestimated Ukraine, but perhaps even some of Ukraine's allies in watching the way this played out?

COL. CEDRIC LEIGHTON (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Absolutely, Erica. I think nobody expected the Ukrainians to do something as audacious as this. And, you know, they're kind of using, I guess, Napoleon's terms because he always used audacity, audacity, audacity as his mantra, you know, to go ahead and to really change the way warfare was fought about 200 years ago.

So when you fast forward to today, what the Ukrainians have done is they have gone in and they've surprised everybody by basically using the Russian infrastructure against Russia itself, using the transportation system with the trucks, using the wooden houses. All of that is, you know, really symptomatic of not only a well-thought-out plan, but actually absolutely brilliant execution.

SANCHEZ: Talk to us more about the complications with this plan, because this was essentially drones, sort of Trojan horse into mobile homes, into the roofs of them. So you had to know where these homes were going, when to pop the roof off, and then program the drones so that they know where to go, knowing whether and all the complications are in the way.

LEIGHTON: Yes, absolutely. So, Boris, one of the things that they had to do was figure out not only what are the targets going to be and what's the most likely thing but where are those mobile Russian wooden houses going to be placed, going to be moving. So they basically had to have gone into the manifests for all the trucks.

So all the trucking companies were clearly targets of Ukrainian intelligence. So you go in, you hack into the system, you figure out, OK, where is this piece of cargo going? When is it going to arrive there? Is it going to arrive there at about the time that I need it to?

And clearly this was synchronized because these attacks occurred basically within the same timeframe and over a big geographic area. And that geographic area spans basically 11 different time zones. So they were masterfully planning this.

And the other thing about this is that they really knew what the vulnerabilities of the Russian systems were. They knew that there was no anti-drone capability at places like the Belaya Air Base in Irkutsk, for example, and all the other air bases.

So they used that to their advantage, basically used off the shelf drones with explosives and went in and hit the airplanes, which were neatly lined up right on the tarmac for them to hit.

HILL: There's also, when they're able to, as you described, across 11 time zones, and you look at how broad this was, targeting a little over a third, as you noted, of their aircraft, there's a massive psychological impact as well, both on the military in Russia and on civilians.

LEIGHTON: Absolutely. So think about this. You know, we gained an advantage after Pearl Harbor by the Doolittle raid during World War II, where we used, unconventionally, aircraft carriers to take normally land-based bombers and attack Tokyo.

That bombing of Tokyo surprised the Japanese very early on in World War II. This is the same kind of thing. Basically, what they did was they used these Russian trucks to conveniently serve as, in essence, a launching pad for these drones.

And they opened up automatically, you know, remote controlled opened up those roofs.

[13:35:00]

At that time, they disseminated the messages and the drones came up out of the trucks and dispersed and hit their targets, their assigned targets. Each one of those drones had an individual pilot associated with it. So we're talking about 117 different pilots that were flying these drones remote controlled from Ukraine.

SANCHEZ: Speaking of disseminating messages, I wonder how you think this lands with Vladimir Putin, how he might respond.

LEIGHTON: So this is going to be interesting. So on the one hand, a lot of people are talking about this as being a Russian Pearl Harbor, which would, you know, logically mean that all of a sudden Putin, you know, gets the resolve and he's going to go and attack, launch a massive attack. And that would be something that, you know, Putin could do based on his predilection for power, for force and the use of force.

The other part of it, though, is that oddly enough, he kept the talks in Istanbul going and he didn't break those talks off. So there is something in that that tells me that there is part of him that is looking at this and saying, OK, I've got to find a way out of this. So I think that this, you know, I'm not going to say that this is going to be the turning point because it probably isn't. The Russians have a lot more capabilities that they can use.

But the key thing is this. They know that the Ukrainians can surprise them. And the fact of surprise, even if you don't know what that surprise is going to be, could be as much or more of a deterrent than the actual attack itself.

SANCHEZ: It makes you wonder what else Ukraine might have up their sleeve. Colonel Cedric Leighton, thank you so much.

LEIGHTON: You bet, Boris. Thank you.

SANCHEZ: So they've got the degree, but no job offer. Next, why twenty twenty five graduates are set to enter the worst job market in years.

[13:40:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: Sometimes for the class of 2025, they've got their college degrees in hand, but jobs are increasingly out of reach. Despite the overall job market looking pretty good, new data shows that this is in fact the worst job market for grads in years.

CNN's Matt Egan is tracking the numbers for us. So, Matt, take us through them. What's going on?

MATT EGAN, CNN REPORTER: Well, Boris, this is a really hard time to be leaving school and trying to land your first job. And it's kind of a surprising situation because, as you mentioned, at a high level, the jobs market does look healthy, right? Unemployment is low. Wages are up. Job growth has been relentless.

But there are some concerning signs beneath those headlines, including let's look at this. This is the unemployment rate for recent college graduates. So three years ago, it was under 4 percent. But look at this.

It has gone sharply higher to almost 6 percent. That is a big move, much bigger than the rest of the jobs market. And the problem is that entry level hiring is down, especially in the tech world, where a lot of people in college had been hoping to work.

And so that's led to this unusual situation in the jobs market. So this green line is the national unemployment rate. The orange line is unemployment for recent college graduates.

And for the longest time, the recent graduates had a lower unemployment rate than the rest of the market. But that situation has completely reversed. And for the first time since 1980, we have a situation where the unemployment rate for recent graduates is higher than the rest of the the jobs market.

And so this is obviously really frustrating to a lot of college graduates and their parents, especially given how expensive colleges and how much student debt people are leaving school with.

I talked to Gabriel Nash. He's a 24 year old in Orlando. He told me that he has applied to 450 jobs since graduating a year ago. And he said, stressful. He said there's this social pressure of needing to get out and get a job. But if nobody's hiring, what am I supposed to do? And Boris, he is hardly the only person feeling that way right now.

SANCHEZ: And it's about to get more complicated for graduates pretty soon because AI is increasingly getting smarter and it's potentially going to wipe out a lot of jobs and especially entry level jobs.

EGAN: Yes, that is certainly the concern. And look, it's too early to definitively say how much of a role AI is playing, but some of the economists that I talked to do suspect that it is already hurting some entry level jobs, including in computer science and math. You see older than 27 employment in those occupations is flat, slightly higher, but it's down 8 percent for younger workers. These are the recent college graduates.

And Anthropic CEO, he's one of the leaders of the AI boom. He is really sounding the alarm here about what could happen to workers because of this technology.

Take a listen to what the Anthropic CEO had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SARIO AMODEI, CEO, ANTHROPIC: A couple of years ago, you could say that AI models were maybe as good as a smart high school student. I would say that now they're as good as a smart college student and sort of reaching past that. I really worry, particularly at the entry level, that the AI models are, you know, very much at the center of what an entry level human worker would do. What is striking to me about this AI boom is that it's bigger and it's broader and it's moving faster than anything has before.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

EGAN: And so it is that speed that AI is moving that does potentially cause a risk to entry level workers in the future. And if you believe what the Anthropic CEO says, it does suggest that getting a job for recent college graduates could be even harder in the future -- Boris.

SANCHEZ: Matt Egan, thank you so much for breaking that down for us -- Erica.

HILL: Well, let's turn now to some of the other headlines we're watching this hour. The CDC is emphasizing the risk of contracting measles while traveling as cases continue to rise. The agency had recently updated its guidance to warn of the possible exposure in crowded hubs like airports and train stations.

[13:45:04]

Meantime, Colorado's public health officials just confirmed three additional infections are connected to a single international flight into Denver. This makes it now a total of six cases tied to that one flight.

Nationwide there have been more than 1,100 measles cases in the U.S. this year, according to a CNN tally that marks the second worst year since the disease was declared eliminated in the year 2000.

A woman on trial in Australia who's accused of killing three of her in-laws with poisonous mushrooms will be back on the stand tomorrow. Erin Patterson took the stand for the first time today after prosecution arrested its case.

She told the court in terms of her relationship with her -- talked about her relationship with her estranged husband, whose parents were among the guests who died after she served them lunch in 2023. Patterson -- prosecutors rather say that Patterson deliberately laced their food with so-called death cap mushrooms. That's the most toxic mushroom in the world.

Patterson says she did not intend to kill anyone and she has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

And check out some of these images coming out of Italy. These are this is a tour group scrambling down Mount Etna as the Italian volcano shoots, as you see there, clouds of ash and rock into the air.

The eruption began overnight. Several people reported being able to hear those explosions some 30 miles away. Experts say preliminary observations show a partial collapse of the volcano's southeast crater, which has made for some spectacular lava flows in recent months.

Two Massachusetts business owners say they began filming an ICE arrest because something about it just did not feel quite right to them. We'll pick up with what happened next after the break.

[13:50:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: The head of the ICE office in Massachusetts just announced that more than 1,400 undocumented immigrants were arrested in that Commonwealth last month. She said more than half of those detained had quote, significant criminality, calling them murderers, rapists and child sexual predators. It is unclear, though, if a controversial situation Friday in Great Barrington was part of that sweep.

Two bystanders said they were alarmed by what they saw and could not get the answers that they were looking for. The business owners watched masked agents detain a gardener at a job site and then they started recording the incident. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I have asked for IDs. Can you please tell me that you refuse to give us your IDs?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We don't need to give you IDs.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You don't need to give us IDs?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We do not need to give you IDs.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So how do we know you're federal? How do we know you're federal?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You call the locals.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We can't even see an ID. We just have to take your honesty with your face covered that you are who you are.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: CNN's Rafael Romo is here to walk us through the details. And Rafael, I know that at least initially officers had accused the suspect of drunk driving, but we've heard from folks close to him that he doesn't even know how to drive.

RAFAEL ROMO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, that's right, Boris. A lot of the details surrounding the case are not quite clear yet. And at first, it wasn't even clear who the agents were.

And that's why you hear those two business owners demanding to see ID in the video we just watched. Immigration and Customs Enforcement later confirmed in a statement to CNN that those conducting the operation were in fact federal law enforcement officers, citing their badges and body armor. Agents from seemingly multiple law enforcement agencies showed up at a business in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Friday morning.

The agents had their faces covered. They were there to arrest the men from Colombia. And according to the business owners who shot the video, they refused to identify themselves.

Over the weekend, we spoke with the two business owners who witnessed the operation to arrest the immigrant and who told us that by their count, there were about six agents in four different cars. This is what one of them had to say about how the operation was conducted.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SARAH STINER, BUSINESS OWNER WHO RECORDED ICE ARREST: And I just kept asking them if they had a warrant. That was private property, that was our office. And they said they didn't need a warrant.

And we asked for their ID. And they said they didn't have to give their ID.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMO: Boris, in the statement to CNN, ICE also said the following about the arrest. The video depicts ICE officers arresting an illegally present Colombian alien who violated the terms of his release by failing to report to immigration authorities. As ordered, ICE approves of the tactics employed by the officers conducting this enforcement operation as they are highly trained at conducting such actions in a safe, professional manner.

The identity of the man who was arrested has not been revealed. ICE has not disclosed either if he had committed any crimes in the United States other than being in the country illegally -- Boris.

SANCHEZ: And we have yet to hear whether his family has heard from him either. Rafael Romo, live for us in Atlanta, thank you so much.

We're going to bring back criminal defense attorney Mark O'Mara now who is going to give us some legal perspective.

Mark, do federal officers actually have to identify themselves when they're detaining someone?

MARK O'MARA, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY AND FORMER PROSECUTOR: So the code of professional or federal regulations requires ICE and immigration officers to identify themselves as law enforcement officers. Do they have to give their personal name? Maybe not.

So there's always two sides to the coin. But yes, they should, as a matter of respect to the citizen or non-citizen, let them know who they are.

[13:55:00]

SANCHEZ: And there was a dispute over how these folks conducted this operation in part because they were apparently parked on private property and the owners of that property were unhappy that they were there. They told them apparently that they didn't need a warrant to be there. Walk us through the rules of how this goes down.

O'MARA: Right. So if they are, in fact, enforcing a law, then they are allowed to be given a certain amount of discretion. First level of discretion, they can protect themselves.

So they don't have to walk into a crowded area and say, I'm an officer if they're acting undercover. But in this particular case, yes, they do have the right to go onto private property, particularly that which is open to the public, and execute a warrant if they had one, or just act on probable cause, which is what they're saying they did. So yes, they can do it.

The problem with it is that they're causing so much more consternation and conflict and unnecessary concerns with citizens by acting the way that we see on that video and sort of an arrogant, we're going to do whatever we want attitude. And I also would tell you that one concern is that they can get themselves hurt because people start believing or disbelieving that they're proper law enforcement, they could react badly, and then the whole thing goes south.

SANCHEZ: Mark O'Mara, very much appreciate the point of view. Thanks for joining us.

We have some brand new information about that suspect in Colorado, accused of using a homemade flamethrower to set people on fire at a Jewish community event in Boulder.

We'll bring you those details in just moments. Don't go anywhere.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:00:00]