for putin? well, i mean, it s made him look as nic was saying there, it has made him look incredibly weak. for years on reporting on putin here, i have never seen a challenge like this directly to putin. there hasn t been one. he will come out of this, even though normality has been returned on the face of it to moscow, i was driving through it this morning, i have been speaking to people in the country and they re relieved that a deal has been done to avert this crisis, but the re relief, cracks have appeared in the power, the strength, the invulnerability of putin. and that could result in all sorts of unknown consequences. i was fascinated to see those images you were just playing of the wagner forces leaving the city of rostov, but they are
president. aleksandr lukashenko! he has ruled belarus, tolerating little opposition and occupies the post of president from its creation in 1994. but aleksandr lukashenko, dubbed europe s last dictator, has come to be defined by his fealty to putin. president putin used belarus to help launch his 2022 invasion of ukraine, driving russian tanks over the belarus border into kyiv and using belarus skies to bomb their neighbor. we will never be enemies of russia, and we will never look disapprovingly at russia. this is the country closest to us, the people closest to us. while we are in power, we will stick to this tendency. the war drove him into putin s embrace, and putin tightened his hold, pledging to
this morning russian officials say wagner fighters are continuing to withdraw from multiple regions after backing down from their stunning advance on moscow. we re tracking all the fall-out from inside russia. the most significant challenge to vladimir putin s control in his two decades in power, some 23 years in power, despite this deal, the implications for putin and his war in ukraine are still very much unknown. we re joined by cnn military analyst, james spider marks. spider, thanks so much for joining us. putin faces a different reality in this stunning move by prigozhin and his wagner forces. what are you watching for in the coming hours and days? well, primarily, wolf, what i m looking at is what is taking place on the ground in ukraine? how has this departure and i
belarus? does prigozhin now have a target on his back? do you believe that putin and his supporters will actually try to kill him? so i think, again, we have to be very cautious about predicting what this means. he s challenged putin. but wagner has been a very important way in which russia has projected power abroad, in africa, in the middle east, in other countries. and, so, to get rid of wagner would mean a diminution of russian influence and power in other parts of the world. so i think we have to watch this very carefully. we have to see does prigozhin, in fact, go to belarus? do we know whether he s there? what happens to him when he s there? this, again, is part one of, i think, a situation that will be played out over the next few weeks and months. how embarrassing is it for putin? can he actually have to rely on
obviously wagner s troops played a major role in the fighting there in places where the russian military was, perhaps, not performing well. the wagner troops kind of stepped in and filled that void. another question, of course, is whether prigozhin will actually remain in exile in belarus. is he going to seed control of the wagner forces and spend his days living in belarus while the russian military absorbs wagner troops? will the wagner forces be willing to stay under the command of the defense ministry they had been told repeated by prigozhin was not to be trusted and was not looking out for their best interest. all of these things the u.s. intelligence agency will be looking for. in terms of inside russia itself, how is putin going to be reacting to this major challenge to his leadership? is he going to clamp down even further on people s liberties inside russia? is he going to escalate power?