this these events might affect the war in ukraine because certainly on their face a weakened vladimir putin would potentially be good for the ukrainians. but i think on the flip side there is this question that is being asked now at the white house, at the pentagon is what president putin might do if he feels cornered, if he feels boxed in? will he lash out? and remember, michael, russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, and so this is sort of an ongoing worry for the white house. and i do think that has informed some of the strategy that you saw unfold over the last two days, which is basically to say nothing. and, in fact, president biden when he did get on that phone call with leaders from europe this morning, he did make the point and the leaders did agree that trying to say anything more than they ve said had the potential to allow president putin this pretext for claiming some sort of american or nato
the firepower that was unleashed there by the artillery, by the tanks wagner now had in its possession, that certainly seemed to be a very professional army. and it was now yevgeny prigozhin seemed today bow at the height of his power, but it appears as though he s gone one step too far. fred pleitgen there for us. now, prigozhin s actions are considered a serious threat to vladimir putin s grip on power. earlier we spoke about that with our russian affairs contributor, jill dougherty, and asked her how the russian president is now viewed through the eyes of other world leaders. here she is. i think if xi jinping, you know, the leader of china, looking at this he s already seen putin botch the war. this is not good i think for any type of respect that the chinese would have for the russians. he must be in the basement at this point. it s really a disaster, and so
putin? i think that the lasting damage to putin is that many members of the elite and of the population saw the incompetence that the system is absolutely unprepared for a group of armed men to march into 1 million city and seizing the very important command in rostov-on-don which also has a tactical nuclear dimension. that s definitely bad. but i think putin will work overtime now to dismantle this image, to present himself as being back in charge and also to reshuffle his personnel. yeah, yeah. the thing is with prigozhin he d long criticized the military leadership. now he s undermined vladimir putin by saying the rationale for the war was bogus. and of course then heading for moscow. i guess what everyone wants to know and doesn t know is what his aims were and perhaps still
a quick update on our developing story out of russia. officials are telling cnn that u.s. intelligence believes yevgeny prigozhin was planning to challenge russia s military leaders for quite some time. what you see there is video of him surrounded by supporters after he cut a deal with the kremlin to end his insurrection. moscow says it doesn t know where the wagner leader currently is. he was meant to go to belarus. u.s. officials also say washington didn t see any change in russia s military posture during his insurrection. but ukraine saw opportunity in all of that, launching multiple attacks across the eastern front on saturday. kyiv says it made progress in all directions but didn t give any details. since the war began in ukraine 16 months ago now, the belarusian president, alexander lukashenko, has been one of vladimir putin s few close
and from there things really went up for yevgeny prigozhin. he started a media company which then turned into a media and propaganda empire which of course the u.s. says meddled heavily in the 2016 presidential election. prigozhin was actually indicted for that in the united states. but then there was also the wagner private military company, and i saw them in action really at the beginning when they were starting to go to places like syria. and on the ground in syria their forces back then were pretty much doing base protection for the russian military that was on the ground in syria. but from there, things really did evolve. they started getting involved in the oil business in syria and then of course also things like gold and diamonds in african countries and started training the forces of african countries as well. but it really wasn t until the war in ukraine that wagner turned into pretty much a full-on army with really heavy weapons. if you look at the battle in bakhmut, for ins