US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Wagner mercenary group’s revolt against Russian President Vladimir Putin was a “direct challenge” to his authority and provides a battlefield advantage to Ukraine in its war to drive out Russian forces.
“This raises profound questions. It shows real cracks,” Blinken said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “We can’t speculate or know exactly where that’s going to go. We do know that Putin has a lot more to answer for in the weeks and months ahead.”
Putin faced the biggest threat to his nearly quarter-century grip on power after Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin led his troops toward Moscow. The situation has stabilized after the Kremlin said Putin guaranteed that Prigozhin could travel to Belarus and would drop criminal mutiny charges against him and the Wagner fighters involved in the rebellion.
Read more: Russia Retreats From the Brink After Armed Mutiny Against Putin
Blinken, who gave a consistent message across four television interviews Sunday morning, said the US is focused on supporting Ukraine and its counteroffensive against Russian forces, which he said on CNN could “play out over weeks, maybe even over months.”
“To the extent that Russia is now distracted, that Putin has to worry about what’s going on inside of Russia, as much as he has to worry about what he’s trying to do — not successfully — in Ukraine, I think that creates an additional advantage for the Ukrainians,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Blinken said that the US had contact with Russian officials about the safety of US personnel and citizens in the region, and that US intelligence hasn’t seen any change in Russia’s nuclear posture amid the crisis.
“I instructed my own team, at the president’s behest, to engage with the Russians first and foremost to make sure that they understood their responsibilities in terms of protecting our own personnel, ensuring their safety and well being, as well as any American citizens in Russia,” he said.
US intelligence agencies briefed senior military and administration officials on Wednesday that Prigozhin was preparing to take action against senior Russian defense officials, the New York Times reported earlier, citing officials it didn’t identify.
Direct Challenge
Prigozhin’s march toward Moscow “was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority,” Blinken said on CBS. He declined to comment when asked about the intelligence reports.
“It’s been no secret to many people over many months that these tensions were rising, they were brewing,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
“Prigozhin was already saying some rather extraordinary things about Russia’s conduct of the war in Ukraine and going directly at Russia’s military leadership,” Blinken said. “So, this was a rising storm.”
(Updates with more Blinken comments on US shows starting in fourth paragraph.)