The uprising promoted by the paramilitary group Wagner exposed “genuine rifts” in political power in Russia and hit the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, said this Sunday the head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken.
“[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.
The United States, which has held intensive talks with its European allies over the crisis in Russia over the past 24 hours, has so far declined to comment directly on the uprising.
Blinken himself discussed the situation in Russia on Saturday with his colleagues in the G7 countries, but also with Poland and Turkey.
However, on US television, Blinken stated that it was “too early” to speculate on the impact of the crisis in Russia or the war in Ukraine.
“Since the attention is diverted from Russia (…) it creates an additional advantage” for Ukraine as the Ukrainians’ counter-offensive takes place, the US secretary of state said.
“It is too early to know how this will turn out. It is an evolving situation,” he stressed.
Blinken said that having someone in power in Russia directly question Putin’s authority “is a very powerful thing”.
“They had to defend Moscow against the mercenaries they had created themselves,” Blinken said, insisting on the Russian president’s “strategic failure” in Ukraine.
The head of the Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, on Saturday suspended movements of the uprising in Russia against the military command, less than 24 hours after occupying Rostov, a key city in the south of the country before the war in Ukraine .
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Saturday described the group’s action as an insurrection, saying it represented a “mortal threat” to the Russian state and treason, guaranteeing he would not let “civil war” happen.
At the end of the day on Saturday, when the advance of Wagner troops to about 200 kilometers from Moscow was reported, 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 its mercenary camps, causing “a very large number of casualties”, accusations that expose deep tensions within Moscow’s armed forces over the offensive in Ukraine.
Source: DN
