a good sunday evening to you. i m jim sciutto, and this is cnn s special live coverage of the extraordinary yet short-lived uprising in russia that has left much of the world asking exactly how this happened and what could happen next. is putin s leadership under threat? is this an opportunity for ukraine to repel russia s ongoing invasion? we do have new developments tonight, including reaction from the biden administration. but first video has emerged on social media which shows the crash site of a russian military transport plane, reportedly shot down in southern russia saturday by the wagner mercenary group which carried out this rebellion. the russian defense ministry still has not commented on the loss of any aircraft. also, there is still no sign this evening of wagner s leader, yevgeny prigozhin, after he apparently cut a deal with moscow and called off the insurrection. and there is no sign as well of putin after the most serious challenge to his rule since he came t
putin s have this quality, which is when they re in place and in power, they seem eternal. and when they collapse, it looked inevitable. yeah. you know, so we re just going to have to watch. u.s. intelligence officials have told me for some time that the most likely replacement for a putin in russia would come from the right rather than from any sort of progressive or pro-democratic left, that his threat was, in effect, from folks like prigozhin and others. for folks watching from the outside, is a russia without putin potentially worse, more aggressive, more authoritarian? it s more unstable for sure. mm-hmm. there isn t a long liberal tradition in russia. there was an attempt in 1905 when they lost the russo-japanese war to create a liberal regime. it didn t work.