the defense ministry. and putin allowed that to happen. until last night. or this morning, when he gave, this morning moscow time, when he gave his speech. and there, while he never mentioned prigozhin s name directly, he clearly referred to him as a traitor and made it clear he was going to crush this movement. so somehow, a man who has grown up with putin, you know, in saint petersburg, was known as putin s chef, was considered a loyalist, putin has now turned on, thinking he can no longer afford this. i think the second important thing out of this, is that no matter how this turns out, the russian people have heard prigozhin make the case that the war was started on sort of fraudulent circumstances. and the third thing is, among the things we don t know is whether prigozhin has any influence over those additional russian units that have control
the cities that right now prigozhin has managed to hold, that there were many residents who were afraid to have the wagner group there, and were saying please get out of here, they don t want their city destroyed. because i think they are concerned that the battle between russian regular military troops and the wagner group will destroy much around them. and it may well. it sort of depends on how this unfolds. at the end of the day, wagner has 25,000 troops, we think, i m not sure that s big enough for him to do the job he has in mind. so he must be counting on ordinary russian troops and units siding with him, and with some of the generals around putin breaking with putin, and you know, maybe he knows something we don t, but we haven t seen that yet.
city in the south. you might argue nationwide. and now it is in the control for the most part, it seems, of the wagner wagner mercenary group. part of what they call terrorist method, blackmail and mutiny and aimed clearly at unseating the top brass, and calling vladimir putin mistaken and may end up, if it progresses to moscow, may challenge vladimir putin s place in the kremlin as well. that is yet to be seen. we are in frankly an ex ition tension moment between prigozhin and putin and it will define the future of the ukraine war and the fate of this nuclear power. and if in fact prigozhin s wagner troops are in control of rostov, that s a huge embarrassment to putin and the russian military right now, nick paton walsh on the scene for us, we will stay in close touch with you as well.
amount of time in the 80s and started in the 90s selling hot dogs at a hot dog stand and became known as putin s chef, putin s caterer, seen giving food to vladimir putin at various events and managed to build an empire largely thanks to vladimir putin on top of that and that s of course when he got involved in things like the internet research agency with some of the propaganda work that he was doing, the u.s. saying he played a big part meddling in the 2016 election and sanctioned and indicted for that as well. and then you have the wagner private military company, which is one of the things that he also took on there. and this is something, wolf, that you know, we in our work, internationally, have been confronted with, over the past couple of years, if you look at for instance syria, around 2014, 2015, where we would go around syria, and you would already see people from the wagner private military company at that point still doing things like base protection for the russians who
challenge here which is the war is unnecessary and it is because of his defense chiefs wanting to go to war, he didn t blame putin per se for it, but it has come at the expense of russian soldiers, potentially more than 100,000, potentially 200,000, have there have been shortages of ammunition and training, and everything about this war has been wrong, in essence. this is the thrust of what prigozhin is saying. putin has treated prigozhin as a security threat, that he is going to shut down, treasonist is the language that he used, but that doesn t answer prigozhin s point, and there are russian citizens, particularly those who have lost loved ones, brothers, families, fathers, sons, who want answers, is this war worthwhile, and that s a question that i know from having conversations with people in moscow today that is still out there waiting to be answered. so i think that is an issue for him. but the question for prigozhin clearly is how much support can he actually muster from the