One week after that aborted muti
in Russia,
Vladimir Putin
appears to be on a charm offensi
The Russian president
making some rare
public appearances this week,
a likely bid to reassert his aut
It comes as
there is still no sign of the vu
group's leader
since he called off the mutiny
The president of Belarus
says he has arrived in the count
a few days ago.
Also, though, not seen in public
since last Saturday,
Russia's former commander in Ukr
Documents shared exclusively
with CNN suggests
that the general was a VIP membe
of the private VoG
group, military company.
Now, joining us now is Steve Hal
He's the former chief
of Russia operations for the CIA
what do you make of all this
Yeah, it's been quite a week, ha
We you know, we don't have a who
Now, we have a whole lot of cont
And I think we'll start to get m
you know, as the weeks and month
But, you know, with just a week'
worth of looking back,
a couple of things I think
become apparent. Apparent.
The first is,
you know, this is it's amazing.
To me
that the Vladimir Putin
inside the Kremlin
somehow missed all of this.
I mean,
it shows an incredible,
in my view, weakening capability
or distracting capability
on the part of the Kremlin.
The Kremlin has,
you know,
organizations that are designed
and have are very well resourced
to to pick up
exactly this kind of thing,
any threat to the regime.
And we had projections,
comments months before
kind of all of us saw this comin
Except Vladimir
Putin, apparently,
and his security services,
which to me indicates
that they are simply
so focused on Ukraine
that that they've just lost
focus on everything else.
And it's just amazing
that these guys
got almost halfway to Moscow
before they encountered
any resistance whatsoever.
It's just,
you know,
you look back on it's
just a real head scratcher
as far as them missing it that b
I think that's right.
And even to casual observers
in some ways seems almost improb
So, I mean, in the weeks
since the revolt,
we have not heard
from the mercenary group's leade
or the Russian general
who was detained in the aftermat
So what's your best guess as wha
what's happened to them?
Well, if
the first thing that
we learned was that
is that Putin is weakened
and is now being forced to go ou
and do things
that no dictator likes to do,
like press the flesh.
He feels he shouldn't have to do
You can rely on repression.
It is not to go out
and earn anybody's vote.
The second thing that we have le
I think we're going
to see some housecleaning.
Now, whether or not it's
going to be a bloody housecleani
sort of like Stalin
and the other guys
did during the great terror
when you had so many people
who were killed simply
because there was
some question about them
or whether it's a little more su
than that.
Hard to tell.
Putin certainly knows how to do
and has all the tools
we've seen the tools of assassin
that he has.
But it is interesting that
although President
Lukashenko in Belarus
says, oh, yeah, Prigozhin is her
as well as many of his forces,
we have yet to see
any real evidence of Prigozhin h
There's been a little bit of evi
that is coming out
that the forces might be arise a
And, of course,
General Secretary Cohen,
who was also apparently very clo
to Prigozhin in the Volga, group
has also not been seen
for the entire week.
So that could be, in my view,
the beginning of the housekeepin
that Putin so badly needs to do
if he wants to keep his regime t
And a U.S.
official tells
CNN that
the CIA director, Bill Burns, sp
with his Russian counterpart
to assure him
that the US was not involved
in the recent revolt
We've also learned that he paid
to President Zelensky
during a recent visit to Ukraine
What do you make of of all of th
sort of forward leaning by the C
You know, it's important
to use occasionally
the director of the CIA
as almost
a policy instrument
as opposed to just a normal coll
capability and analytical capabi
that the agency usually does.
The reason it's important,
especially with regard to Russia
is because in Russia,
the security services play a muc
political role and policy role
than in the United States
or other Western countries.
So it's important
to speak to the Russians
in language that they use themse
in, that they understand.
So when the director of CIA call
and says, for example,
this is an internal matter,
we had nothing to do with it.
I don't know how many times
I've heard, you know,
state of our internal affairs
from both from from autocracies
like Russia and China.
So it's important for them,
you know, for them to hear that
It has not only a calming effect
on Russia,
but it robs them
of a propaganda opportunity to s
oh, well, this was a,
you know, a foreign intervention
of some type.
Foreign Minister Lavrov
sort of alluded to it a little b
and said, well,
there could have been foreign pa
involved somehow,
but he didn't really try very ha
That was,
I think,
because the CIA director
had set the stage
for taking that argument away fr
Fascinating.
Steve Hall, thank you
Sure.