New this morning,
we are now hearing from the Kremlin
that you've forgotten met
with President Vladimir Putin
after his short lived mutiny
at the end of June.
Remember that attempted coup
What we're told the meeting
took place on June 29th.
That was five days after the rebellion.
CNN senior
international correspondent Fred
Pleitgen joins us now.
Fred, This is a bit of a surprise, right?
I mean, what can we read from this
Why? It is.
That's to say the least.
It's a bit of a surprise.
And I think it is something
that certainly shows
that Wagner,
the Viognier
group, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his fighters
certainly are of huge significance
to Vladimir Putin.
If he was willing to meet
with Yevgeny Prigozhin just five days
after that, that mutiny.
So obviously,
one of the things that we heard from
the Kremlin today is No.
One really knew
where Yevgeny Prigozhin was.
People thought that he might have been
in Belarus.
Then, of course,
the Belarussian leader,
Alexander Lukashenko,
he told our own Matthew Chance
last week
that actually
gaining production
was back in St Petersburg, in Russia.
So now the Kremlin coming out
and saying that on June 29.
So just a couple of days, five days
after that, Newton Yevgeny Prigozhin
and 35
commanders, as the Kremlin put
it, were inside the Kremlin.
Now, apparently,
Vladimir Putin
gave his own assessment
of what they called
the special military operation,
which is obviously
Russia's war in Ukraine,
but then also about the mutiny itself.
And then also apparently this
according to the Kremlin,
offered his thoughts on possible
further deploying since.
Now, the interesting thing about all
this is
they said
that 35 commanders took part,
including Yevgeny Prigozhin.
They did not say whether people
from Russia's
defense ministry took part
of course, one of the things that we know
is that Yevgeny
Prigozhin was on his way
to Moscow on June 24th, specifically
to try and go after the defense minister
and Vladimir Putin's top generals.
So all of these see
all of this directly,
also in defiance of Vladimir Putin.
Now we're learning
that Yevgeny production was
in fact in the Kremlin
certainly seems to show
that despite the fact
that Yevgeny production
has now been
discredited on Russian state media,
pretty much since that happened,
the fighters that he commanded
and control
still seem very important
for the Kremlin leader, guys.
Yeah, no question about that.
Fred Pleitgen, thanks so much.
And we want to bring in now
CNN security analyst Beth Sanner,
and Colonel Cedric
Leighton is back with us.
Beth, I want to start with you,
because I'm kind of mind blowing,
to be honest with you.
And I'm
not the expert
that you are about all this
but Fred makes a great point.
Over the course of the last
several weeks, you've seen Prigozhin
kind of completely undercut
our Russia state media.
You saw President Putin's statement
when he finally started
speaking after the mutiny,
really attacking
the idea of it
and the actions that were taken.
What do you make of the fact
that production was in
was meeting
with President Putin
just five days after the mutiny?
Well, you know,
I think this shows
another step in the Kremlin plan to deal
with Prigozhin
in this kind of post mutiny environment.
I think they have three things
that are going on right here
and that we're seeing unfold.
One is that
they're trying to change the narrative
and discrediting Prigozhin
and getting leverage over
the still popular figure
is the first part of this plan.
The second part is to wrest control over
as much of Bognor
as they can,
because Bognor is extremely important.
So they took over, for example,
the Internet,
the disinformation arm,
the IRA that still promotes
disinformation worldwide,
the Syria campaign.
And then the third is what we saw,
I think, in this meeting with Putin
and that is to figure out
how do we rebrand and reshape
Wagner elements,
the ones that we still need
says Putin,
the ones that we can't yet
get rid of or maybe never can
because they're so important.
So I think that's
what we're seeing here unfold.
All right.
Colonel, wait.
And I want to bring you in
to get your thoughts on
what this says about Putin,
that he would meet
with Prigozhin mere days
after the attempted coup.
Yeah.
To me,
it seems like
this is a sense of of his weakness.
We're getting a sense that he's
looking at things that he needs to change
in order to maintain his power.
It's also a situation,
I think, where Prigozhin
either has something on Putin
or he's got enough leverage
where he can actually control some of not
only the narrative,
but also what Putin does next.
Think about what
they have, for example, in Africa.
You know,
you've got the Wagner group
all over Africa.
You've got them in Syria.
That's a huge arm
of Russian foreign policy
that's sitting right there.
And if that is somehow stopped
or doesn't work as well as it once did,
that creates a real problem
for the Kremlin.
And Putin
can't afford to have that problem
in addition to the problems
that he has in Ukraine right now.
Your friends close your enemies
closer, right? Sure.
And the kind of
question, you know,
our Ben Wedeman
called this kind of a soap opera,
a little bit of Ben,
as the world turns to some degree,
as we watch from our position.
If you're U.S.
intelligence at this point in time,
how are you
kind of watching, analyzing
what's been happening
and trying to draw some conclusions
about what
this may say about next steps
for President Putin and Russia?
Well, you
break it down into the things
that matter to U.S.
interests
and I think about this kind of in
concentric rings.
You know,
the first part of it is, you know,
how does this affect Putin?
And I think that
while it shows some weakness
in terms of the symbiotic relationship,
it it doesn't necessarily threaten Putin
in the near term.
And so I think that, you know,
he actually is fairly in control at home
in the wake of this.
But as you move out,
this concentric rings to the Ukraine war
and then really to relationships
China, the relationship with China
and how allies think about it.
And then like this foreign policy
security arm in Africa, Wagner,
these things start to weaken
as the ripples
kind of go out on these concentric rings.
So as an intel officer,
you break these down
and you start figuring out
what are
the leverage points
to not only understand it, but to
take advantage of it.