he described a meeting with a senior fighters and wegner boss yevgeny prigozhin . the kremlin says that meeting happened five days after he led that failed rebellion against the military. the article details how president putin is putting a wedge between yevgeny prigozhin and thousands of fighters. alex, you are there. what are you learning about this interesting development we are hearing from president putin in that media article? reporter: it is interesting. it appears that he s making two points. one, legally there are no mercenary groups allowed in russia and the other that he s not operating in ukraine and we heard the from the pentagon last night. what form what form he takes beyond ukraine is a question. they have operations in africa and the middle east and the
inappropriate. can i amend my comments to people of color? he wishes to amend his comments. mr. speaker, to have the word stricken. i didn t ask for an amendment. reporter: you see that part of the debate last night over in the house of representatives. it goes to show you how much this debate has evolved over the last several days as they have moved forward with debating the national defense authorization act. we should say again, this was a bill that passed out of committee with bipartisan support. it s changed immensely over the last five days. thank you, lauren for your reporting. coming up, russian president vladimir putin speaking out about the wegner group since its fighters lead a
fate of their leader yevgeny prigozhin. that s in the balance. here s more what president putin told the newspaper. we do not have a law for private military organizations he said. it does not exist. there s no such legal entity. he admits that it is not an easy question. he gave interesting details about that meeting five days after that mutiny. he met with 35 commanders at the kremlin. yevgeny prigozhin was there and she said to the commanders you can join them russian military keep fighting to your current commander and continue to stay in this fight. the men are not in agreement with yevgeny prigozhin . he said the guys do not agree with this decision. we don t know from this article how this ended. it does appear that president putin is trying to divide and weaken yevgeny prigozhin while maintaining the wegner
fighters who are a significant fighting force. it s very interesting to see where those thousands of paid fighters go. you work the news yesterday. these controversial u.s. applied cluster munitions are in ukraine. spoke to a general who said that s what happened. what more do you know along those lines? are they being used yet? reporter: let me answer your last question. those wegner fighters are still in russia occupied ukraine. as for the cluster munitions, the general told me they have not been used. the pentagon did confirm our reporting from this general that these u.s. highly controversial cluster munitions are in ukraine ready to be used. the pentagon said there is a third country that had provided cluster munitions. we understand that country is turkey. ukraine and russia have both