will be shed from one of the sides, we turn our columns around and leave in the opposite direction to the field camps according to the plan. russia says it s dropping charges against prigozhin. he agreed to leave russia for belarus, but there is no word where he is not right now. a as for vladimir putin, he emerges from this crisis weaker among world leaders and his own people. jason crow serves on the intelligence and foreign affairs committee and says putin and prigozhin are worse off. anybody thinks that either putin or prigozhin is going to walk away from this unscathed, they are fooling themselves. the idea that prigozhin s going to go to belarus and retire in peace and the wagner mercernaries are going to return to the battlefield and putin s going back to situation normal is just not going to happen, right. putin has been extremely weakened by this. analysts say putin faces a
and also other countries as well is they tried to make clear they are not playing any sort of role in this. they don t want to be accused of taking a said, accused of meddling. they said they are watching this closely and, obviously, with a lot of concern, considering the amount of nuclear weapons that russia has and the giant military that it has as well, wolf. fred pleitgen reporting from berlin. thank you very much. i want to bring in cnn military analyst retired u.s. air force colonel cedric leighton. how much weaker is putin today knowing that wagner fighters got within about 120 miles or so from moscow only yesterday with very little resistance? yeah, this is really interesting, wolf, because what you re looking at is two basic things here. first of all, you re right. there is a degree of weakness in terms of how they responded to it, putin s regime responded to this.
does putin escalate in ukraine, for example, to show that he has control and that he is a strong man. and is he trying to consolidate power further after this very dramatic move by prigozhin. obviously, u.s. officials are also watching what prigozhin does. is he really going to go into exile in belarus? is he going to agree to stay out of wagner group? has wagner group actually been disbanded or is it going to be rolled into the russian military and wagner forces told by prigozhin for quite some time now not to trust sergei shoigu, the russian defense minister, are they going to simply agree to be under his command? so all of these things are what u.s. officials and western officials are discussing now in phone calls and conversations moving forward and, obviously, it is a very unpredictable and volatile situation, wolf. certainly is. stand by. i will get back to you soon.
i would not like to be yevgeny prigozhin at the moment. the deal says that he will go into exile in belarus, but as we know, opponents of the kremlin do not tend to live long fulfilling lives. so i am not convinced that the kremlin will honor its part of that deal. what is interesting, i think, is that he did get some of what he was asking for. some of his wagner forces will remain independent of the russian military, which had been a difference from what was planned several weeks ago. but i think we probably have not seen the end of this affair, and certainly i do not think that prigozhin is going to remain a free and independent man for very long. so what i hear you saying, correct me in i m wrong, you believe putin will continue to order the assassination, the killing of prigozhin. is that what you re saying? it would not surprise me, yes.
the person who could balance the power of the oligarchs in the country. that clearly is no longer true. we have known that his sort of supreme military planning skills have fallen apart over the past year and a half in ukraine and here to have this massive dissent on russia streets, a huge military armed force essentially coming to take battle with his own army, again just shows weakness and also shows the weakness within the military. the structures within the military are riddled with private military contractors like wagner, for the soldiers at the bottom end of these structures, it s unclear who their lines of command are. so it reveals also a flawed and weak russian military more so than i think we had any idea until yesterday. good point. nic robertson, thank you very much. we will get back to you soon. i want to go to our senior international correspondent fred