The rebellion promoted by the Wagner paramilitary group revealed “real fissures” in political power in Russia, hitting the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, the head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, said today.
“[A rebelião] directly challenged Putin’s authority. So this raises real questions and reveals real fissures” at the highest level of the Russian state, the US Secretary of State told CBS television.
The United States, which has held intensive consultations with its European allies over the past 24 hours on the crisis in Russia, has so far refused to comment directly on the rebellion.
Blinken himself discussed the situation in Russia on Saturday with his counterparts in the G7 countries, as well as Poland and Turkey.
On American television, Blinken declared, however, that it was “too early” to speculate on the impact of the crisis in Russia or the war in Ukraine.
“As Russia’s attention is diverted (…), this creates an additional advantage” for Ukraine, while the Ukrainian counter-offensive is carried out, said the US Secretary of State.
“It is too early to know how this will end. It is an evolving situation, ”she stressed.
Blinken said the fact that someone in power in Russia directly questions Putin’s authority “is a very powerful thing.”
“They had to defend Moscow from the mercenaries that they themselves created,” Blinken said, insisting on the “strategic failure” of the Russian president in Ukraine.
The head of the Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, suspended this Saturday the rebellion movements in Russia against the military command, less than 24 hours after having occupied Rostov, a key city in the south of the country for the war in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday called the group’s action a rebellion, saying it was a “deadly threat” to the Russian state and treason, guaranteeing he would not allow a “civil war” to break out.
At the end of the day on Saturday, when the advance of Wagner’s forces was reported to some 200 kilometers from Moscow, Prigozhin announced that he had negotiated an agreement with the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko.
Earlier, the head of the paramilitary group accused the Russian army of attacking his mercenary camps, causing “a very high number of casualties,” accusations that expose deep tensions within Moscow’s forces over the offensive in Ukraine.
Source: TSF
