yesterday s near mutiny and russia. senior international correspondent sam kiley is following that part of the story. this is a combat ready private army that s been instrumental to russia s objectives for nearly a decade especially in ukraine in recent months as we know, moscow once these mercenaries to join its army? that sounds far-fetched but how likely is that to happen? i think now, it has been an open insurrection inside russian territory, and they could face prosecution unless they agreed to sign up. they don t really have much choice, jim. i think the wagner group was able to reject that idea, before they turned their guns against their own people and their own military but now that they ve attempted to sort of storm moscow, they captured a military base, been accused of potentially downing to aircraft , social media showing that they may have shut down to aircraft, this is serious stuff.
times as has cnn, that it was reported on wednesday may before, they had a good sense of what was going to go on. it s interesting that the administration chose not in any way, to get involved. for a couple of reasons. first, they didn t want to be seen backing prigozhin, i mean, he s sanctioned by the united states. and they certainly didn t want to be helping putin, so this was a fight between two pretty unsavory characters. but second, if you listen closely to president biden over the past year, he always wants to make sure that putin has an offering, because a desperate putin, a putin that is desperate that he will lose power is also one much more likely to use nuclear arson. beth, what do you make of that prospect? we were talking about this with the congressman in the previous hour that often what we ve seen, russian history and soviet history is that things can happen very quickly,
. there s no question about it. there s a lot of things with russia, where you think the facade is a strong weapon system or a strong force but the fact of the matter is, is that facade is just that, it s only the face of it. once you go beneath the surface, you find there are a lot of weaknesses there. and that s been characteristic of the russian military for a long time. we thought they had overcome some of those weaknesses. the war in ukraine has brought the weaknesses back to the forefront and we realize, in spite of efforts by russian leadership to change the way they are doing things, they have not achieved success in that regard. that facade is basically a very weak military structure that
during the course of the nbi, the board will work to determine the cause of this marine casualty and the five associated debts. the mbi is also responsible for accountability aspects, and it can make recommendations to the proper authorities to pursue several several criminal sanctions as necessary . the board is working with u.s., uk and french partners which of course reflects the nationalities of the people who were aboard the vessel. so you can see there s now a multinational effort to try and bring some sort of closure to these families at the end of the investigation. the board will issue a report and the point is to avoid any of these tragedies from happening again. thank you very much. coming up, the wagner mercenary group has played a key role in russia s war in ukraine.
left in this suv. the kremlin says it has dropped charges and prigozhin will go to belarus while promising as fighters contracts with the russian military. for now, a crisis apparently averted. but this very public betrayal and the mercenaries short but unimpeded march on moscow reveals deep weakness at the heart of the putin regime. now let s go over to the white house. what can you tell us about this call between president biden and ukraine s president zelenski? president biden place this call to zelenski well spending the weekend in camp david and the white house says that they discuss not only the united states continued support for ukraine but also that situation in russia. the president has been working the phones over the course of the weekend and we learned that he also spoke with canadian prime minister justin trudeau