with vladimir putin himself just five days after the june 24th, insurrection. what his fate is we don t know. anthon antho anthony blinken saying the last chapter of putin and prigozhin hasn t been written yet. thank you so much. joining us to discuss this is military analyst and nato allied commander retired general wesley clark and political and national security analyst david sanger. thank you gentlemen, for joining us. i want to start with you, general, about this new reporting today. we have confirmed that a senior russian general operating in southern ukraine has been fired accusing russia s defense min min ministry of betraying his troops because he doesn t have the necessary support. can you tell us what this tells us about russia s capabilities
it s a good thing. let s get rid of the rest of them. and it s a good point. it s not as if he s standing up on moral grounds or anything like that. he is standing up because they re not supporting him in the goals of the war, not because he questions those goals themselves. roman, on this front, you do have some new reporting on yevgeny prigozhin. as i mentioned, general surovikin hasn t been seen since the coup. prigozhin hasn t been seen sisince the failed coup. what more can you tell us? as for prigozhin, we don t know for sure. his location is still unknown. but we have a lot of indications that he s still inside russia most probably in st. petersburg, his native city where he has a lot of real estate assets. so he definitely has some place to live. but what we did, we produced
yeltsin, turned the reins over to putin, russia and china were not friends. they had troopeds on each other troops on each other s borders, now putin looks like a strawman. the military leadership that allowed wagner forces to take that southern town of process to have in the south and rostov and march within 75 miles of moscow, that doesn t look like a strong dictator. it s clearly the biggest challenge to putin s power. howard: you say prigozhin hasn t been punished, that was the deal. drop the charms and go to another country, belarus, and we ll see. so this might be good for ukraine in terms of the war because you could be taking 25,000 of the best trained and equipped soldiers off the battlefield, these mercenaries. the media say it s certainly true that vladimir putin s longstanding reputation as a strongman, as a provider of stability for the russian state has been hurt, has been wounded. but if putin is pushed out, this is where where the conversation
some newspapers and blogs report that he was arrested over last weekend s brief rebellion. a government official is denying that saying he s not in any pretrial detention facility. i don t want to comment on the nonsense of, quote, an underground detention facility. this general, though, hasn t been seen for days. we should note neither has wagner s chief, yevgeny prigozhin. what do we know? reporter: prigozhin hasn t been seen for days and nor has this general, general surovikin. and the kremlin are refusing to comment on his whereabouts. you heard that local official saying he s not in a pretrial detention center but he may well be somewhere else perhaps being held on a military base. we just don t know where he is. but these documents that were given to cnn exclusively do show that general surovikin, who is the deputy commander, remember,
loss. why is he, to the extent we know, we haven t seen him in several days. why is he still alive? why was a deal struck here? we have to measure prigozhin s importance by how putin sees him, that putin let him get away with this. prigozhin is the russians every man, the man that every russian wants to be, the street fighter that came up from nothing and became a billionaire and then is there on the front lines with the troops, and saying things that no one else dares to say. so, in that sense, i think putin understood that taking him out now would make him a martyr and damage putin s own regime and the war in ukraine permanently, whereas what he s now probably got to do is, we wake up to news this morning that the court case against prigozhin hasn t been dropped. which is fascinating, by the way. exactly. wait, what? so what i think we re going to see now is this long drawn out public campaign to slowly