Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested that the potential threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin might not be over.
While speaking on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Blinken said the brief revolt led by the Wagner Group, a private mercenary group, has revealed “cracks” in Russia that were not previously there.
“We don’t have full information, obviously, and it is too soon to tell exactly where this will go. And I suspect that this is a moving picture, and we haven’t seen the last act yet. But we could say this. First of all, what we’ve seen is extraordinary. And I think you’ve seen cracks emerge that weren’t there before,” Blinken said. Although the conflict only lasted roughly 24 hours before Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin announced his plans to turn his troops around, Blinken said the event was a “direct challenge to Putin’s authority.”
“Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were on the doorstep of Kyiv in Ukraine, thinking they’d take the city in a matter of days, thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country,” Blinken said. “Now, over this weekend, they’ve had to defend Moscow, Russia’s capital, against mercenaries of [their own] making.”
Blinken added that Prigozhin had raised significant questions about the premises for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in the first place.
The Biden official refused to say if the short rebellion is the “beginning of the end” of Putin but did call Russia’s actions in the war in Ukraine a “strategic failure.”
On Saturday, Prigozhin made a deal requiring him to leave Russia for Belarus while Moscow promised to revoke criminal charges against him. The conflict began when Prigozhin— once a close ally of Putin— accused Russian forces of targeting Wagner troops in missile strikes, leading him to stage an attempted coup against the communist leader.
