Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken stated on Sunday that the temporary revolt led by the top of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, revealed cracks rising in President Vladimir V. Putin’s maintain on energy and solid doubt on the way forward for his battle in Ukraine.
“Prigozhin himself in this entire incident has raised profound questions about the very premises for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in the first place, saying that Ukraine or NATO did not pose a threat to Russia, which is part of Putin’s narrative,” Mr. Blinken stated on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And it was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority.”
The inner challenges going through Mr. Putin may additionally hinder Russia’s battle effort, Mr. Blinken stated.
“To the extent that the Russians are distracted and divided, it may make their prosecution of the aggression against Ukraine more difficult,” he stated on ABC’s “This Week,” calling the present instability in Russia “a cause for concern.”
During a collection of TV appearances on Sunday, Mr. Blinken stated the White House was carefully monitoring developments in Russia, the place a deal struck late Saturday appeared to finish the revolt.
The deal Mr. Prigozhin struck is claimed to permit him and his fighters to flee prosecution, though U.S. leaders have no idea what is going to occur to him or his forces, Mr. Blinken stated on “This Week.”
While Mr. Blinken referred to as the upheaval “fundamentally an internal matter for the Russians,” he positioned it in the identical framework that U.S. leaders have used for greater than a yr when discussing the invasion. The revolt, he stated, is a part of a broader “strategic defeat” that has left Russia weaker economically and militarily because of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
While Mr. Blinken instructed that Ukraine may benefit from the sudden instability in Russia, it’s unclear whether or not that can occur.
“It’s going to take some time, weeks, maybe even months,” for the counteroffensive to succeed, he stated on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “There are very strong defenses that the Russians have built up in recent months that the Ukrainians are working their way through. But at the end of the day, the bottom line really is this, and it’s the reason that Ukraine will prevail: This is about their land, this is about their future, this is about their freedom, not Russia’s.”
Mr. Blinken stated on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he spoke together with his Ukrainian counterpart, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, on Saturday, and added that the United States had “worked to make sure that the Ukrainians have what they need, when they need it, to do as well as they possibly can on the ground.”
Although he declined to take a position on what Mr. Prigozhin’s problem to Mr. Putin’s energy might imply for the long run, Mr. Blinken stated that it “raises lots of questions that we don’t have answers to.”
“It’s too soon to tell exactly where this is going to go,” he stated. “And I suspect that this is a moving picture and we haven’t seen the last act yet.”
Source: www.nytimes.com