good morning, it is 11:00 a.m. eastern, i m katy tur here from new york. and i m chris jansing with special coverage on what is happening inside russia. for the first time, we are still waiting to hear from vladimir putin. now, we haven t heard anything since his former ally and the head of the ruthless mercenary wagner group attempt add revolt, and this new video released by russia, is it new or just something put out by the kremlin? who knows when it was taped. we can t say. and where is the man responsible for the dramatic weekend events, yevgeny prigozhin. right now we still don t know and he hasn t been seen since saturday when he decided to turn his forces back after marching toward the kremlin. and seemingly agreed to live in exile in belarus. so now russia, a country armed with more nuclear weapons than any other nation led by a man desperate to proclaim the old soviet union glory is at a crossroads. and while the world watches,
putin being irrevocably undermined, putin being on the way out. putin being in deep trouble. yeah, this was an uncomfortable little incident to say the least, but i would be very cautious with thinking that we are close to the end of vladimir putin. so is your implication that prigozhin misread the situation or do you buy his statement that he was worry that russia was killing its own people and he was just doing this as a protest. he never meant this as a coup? i think he s been very angry, genuinely angry. i think the troops that were sent to the front at the beginning of the war, they were woefully inequipped and the organization of the invasion was criminally inept. so i think prigozhin has had every reason to be angry. quite what he intended, he didn t use the word coup.
don t know, that helps us understand more of where prigozhin was coming from, says he was coming from? reporter: well, i think the most interesting part of that statement from the point of view of the ukrainians and what s happening on the battlefield in ukraine is the bit where prigozhin talks about this change in status. that on july the 1st, mercenaries were going to be absorbed into the russian military, and he says in this audio statement that they put it out to their guys and said, hey, who wants to join the regular russian forces and be commanded by essentially the guy at the top, putin and his defense minister choi gu, if you believe p prigozhin, he says only about 1 to 2% actually wanted to be part of the regular russian military. and then of course there are several other things that happened in between, and we have the march on moscow. what it means now on the battlefield here is it may, in
their counteroffensive and take advantage of the disarray in russia over the next couple of weeks. we ve gotten an updated translation from our own people on what prigozhin said. as a result oaf intrigues of poorly thought out decision wagner was supposed to have ended its existence on july 1st, 2023. i presume he s talking about the deal that russia wanted to fold all of these mercenary groups under the direction of the ministry of defense. those fighters who have decided they are ready to join the ministry of defense have done so, but it s a very small number measured at around 1 to 2%. he says we were categorically against what they, the government and the defense wanted to do. the administrative defense launched a missile strike on us and immediately following this helicopters attacked us, he says. nearly 30 wagner fighters were killed, he says. we stopped for the following two reasons, firstly to prevent russian blood from being shed.
haven t heard directly from vladimir putin today? i know they released that video. it s not dated. it s not clear when it was shot. he doesn t address what happened over the weekend which makes people wonder if this was an old video shot at some other point? i don t think it was an old video. i think it was a video to try to put down the uprising and in the end the uprising did evaporate. i m not particularly surprised that he hasn t appeared. he doesn t really push himself on russians in a blatant way. when you re in russia, in moscow, anywhere for that matter, you never see a billboard with putin s face on it. you never see an image of him. and i think he i think his quasi invisibility at times and his invisibility over the last 48 hours, he thinks it s quite an effective way to maintain