afternoon, i m yasmin vossoughian, on a very busy saturday afternoon. coming on the air today following an ongoing military conflict inside russia. we are now learning moments ago, you give guinea prigozhin, the leader of the wagner mercenary group is standing down. , this after escalation late yesterday as the group started making its way towards moscow, threatening vladimir putin s grip on power. the wagner group, until recently, was fighting alongside russian forces in ukraine, but yesterday accusing the kremlin of killing thousands of its soldiers based on quote unquote, false pretenses, prigozhin and his troops have taken control of the city home to the russian military headquarters for the ukraine war, we are unsure where the control stands now. in a televised address this morning, vladimir putin accused the wagner mercenaries of quote unquote treason, and vowing to punish anyone involved in a, quote, armed rebellion. we this is a criminal adventurous to campaign. , i
this latest audio message. prigozhin speaks in a very intense and sharp manner, and it has a lot of, bravado that was still present, but conciliatory, of course he, was announcing that he was standing down. we have heard some additional details on this process, from the belarusian state media, claiming that belarusian president, lukashenko is who a very staunch ally of putin s, somehow negotiated the steel was involved in the process and so he claims, was speaking to prigozhin all day, with the blessing of putin. we know the two of them that being lukashenko and putin, spoke this morning, some timelines match, so we definitely organist where this, goes i think a lot of great points have been made here so far about the trustworthiness about prigozhin, putin as. well lukashenko, you can add to that. list so we re just going to see who moves back, what kind of reconciliation is made.
he may lean on one of his very few allies for help with his war in ukraine. wall street journal titled putin s belarus vision. jack keane, retired four star general. good morning to you. it appears based on the headlines and the story what he is looking for here is obvious. do you think it is necessarily? yeah, he has had a strained relationship lukashenko. longest serving dictator in europe who has had a frosty relationship with putin. no doubt they have provided a platform for putin to train his soldiers and had ground attacks and fired missiles and rockets from belarus. what putin would like is for belarus to come into the war. belarus is a border to nato
countries, poland, lithuania, latvia and it would mean a lot to have him in the war. lukashenko s problem is the people don t like him much. they re fundamentally opposed to belarus getting involved in this war. militarily it is insignificant. 15,000 troops, poorly trained, not well equipped. they ll add nothing to the fight whatsoever. nonetheless, putin is there to get support from him and listen, there are tens he hasn t been there in three years. so it seems like a move of desperation. am i right on that? well lukashenko has come to visit him a number of times over the three years so it is not that they don t have a relationship. but what s taking place that has
the ukrainians very concerned, there are tens of thousands of russian troops, mostly new mobilized troops that are training in belarus. there is a thought that come late january or february putin may indeed be willing to commit to another attack on the capital of kiev. now, when we look at that at the institute for the study of war it doesn t make a lot of sense. they would lose that fight. there are a lot of things the russians have done that haven t made a lot of sense to be frank bit. but this is a geopolitical move more than anything else by putin with lukashenko to try to get as much support from him as much as he can. bill: they failed miserably the first time around. a lot with our intel. quickly on north korea. what s going on there? we have a launch per week. sometimes it comes per day. the latest launch was to test a satellite. who is helping them?