come again. -sorry, what was that? introducing the next generation 10g network only from xfinity. hello i m alicia menendez the future starts now. with ali meridian thank you for joining our coverage as the world watches a crisis unfold in russia it has been a while 24 hours testing vladimir putin s hold on power. the kremlin now protecting the world and it reached a deal with the leader of a mercenary group that has gone rogue. prigozhin the leader of the mercenary group ordered his forces to return to their bases abandoning an armed rebellion that had them heading towards moscow the new video showing prigozhin greeted with cheers as he left the city of hours ago. that is where he had taken control of the key russian military facility an act of retaliation after russia s military launched a missile strike on wagner group camps, the kremlin has said that prigozhin would quote go to belarus and wagner soldiers would not be prosecuted, nbc news has not independently confi
are actually former prisoners, they were recruited from prison with the promise of some kind of pardon by the president. it s not entirely clear whether everybody who gets that, who was recruited from the president into this private army will get to enjoy the privilege. for a lot of these men, regardless of the guarantees given by this agreement, there is a lot of uncertainty. they really do have a lot to be afraid of in modern russia. guys? it is as you said mystifying. your sense, matt, of how all of this is going to affect zelenskyy and the war in ukraine? well, i mean, the thing is on the front line the wagner group was already withdrawn. even in the past couple of weeks we weren t seeing wagner fighters fighting on the frontlines near places like bakhmut, a city that they were instrumental, really crucial and taking inches the last couple of months. so, whether or not this will actually have a visible obvious effect, it is not entirely
be a debacle. wagner, this private mercenary army stepped in, filled the breach and at great cost to its mostly convict soldier who were getting pressed into duty given this deal freedom to fight on the front line, a kind of bargain that if you are a condemned prisoner can be tempting. they took this deal, fought hard and they had success where the regular mainstream army did not have success and had failure after failure. that gained wagner popularity. and, prigozhin is a communicator every day, practically, he himself was out on telegram speaking, wearing a jacket, sometimes speaking from the bunkers, speaking in courts
hours ago. that is where he had taken control of the key russian military facility an act of retaliation after russia s military launched a missile strike on wagner group camps, the kremlin has said that prigozhin would quote go to belarus and wagner soldiers would not be prosecuted, nbc news has not independently confirmed the details of that deal. so how did we reach this moment, the wagner group is what russia calls a quote private military company, the u.s. calls it a proxy force for the russian government. until now, prigozhin served putin as a loyal soldier aiding russia s war of choice in ukraine. but that has now turned on its head. in a new call for msnbc.com, danny none of this would happen if putin hadn t invaded ukraine in the first place because of his propensity towards maintaining a russian influence without tapping into the russian army, putin created a frankenstein, quasi-army he couldn t fully control. in the process putin elevated a
rescuing russia from the chaos that fall of the 1991 collapse of the soviet union. talk to me about that, which was supposed to be his greatest accomplishment. i absolutely agree with that statement. this was supposed to be putin s magnum opus. this is supposed to be putin showing that a unipolar world led by the u.s. was not going to be the feature. that russia had to be considered on a global scale. and what we have seen is that wagner forces in russia, and parts of russia, much quicker than they even took forces in ukraine. so, when you have the russian president figuring out that his own domestic troops are not as good as those have been privately trained, you have a situation where he looks like a fool. he looks like a fool on a global level. but also the question becomes, who actually controls russia? because there is not a lot of faith and putin right now domestically, but also internationally. so, he is in an incredibly different difficult position. you tweeted to that poin