Video appears to show Wagner leader Prigozhin greeting fighters in Belarus
Video appears to show Wagner leader Prigozhin greeting fighters in Belarus
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00 New today, Yevgeny Prygozhin, the man who waged an armed rebellion against Vladimir
00:05 Putin has reportedly been spotted in public for the first time since that uprising.
00:11 This is the grainy video posted on Wagner's social media channels that appears to show
00:15 the mercenary leader greeting his troops in Belarus.
00:18 Now, the video appears unedited, but it was filmed in very low light.
00:23 As you can see, CNN can't definitively confirm the speaker in the video is in fact Prygozhin
00:29 or even when the video was recorded.
00:32 CNN chief international security correspondent Nick Payton-Walsh has been following this
00:36 new development.
00:37 So, Nick, what more can you tell us first about the video and about Yevgeny Prygozhin's
00:42 whereabouts?
00:43 Yeah, I mean, it is extraordinary, this video.
00:48 It doesn't really give us particularly compelling evidence that Prygozhin is in the dark, grainy
00:55 footage that appears to be possibly from the camp in Belarus that, as they claim when they
01:01 post this video, is where Wagner fighters may have relocated to.
01:06 Essentially, this comes forward and says that Yevgeny Prygozhin, after his long absence,
01:10 is essentially keeping with the deal provided by Belarus's president, Alexander Lukashenko,
01:16 that turned his armoured column round on the way to Moscow during that failed armed rebellion.
01:20 And it interestingly, too, emerged a matter of maybe three hours after here in Prague,
01:27 the head of Britain's foreign intelligence agency, MI6, said that in their assessment,
01:32 Yevgeny Prygozhin, I asked him, is he alive?
01:34 Is he healthy?
01:35 And he said that Prygozhin was, quote, floating about.
01:38 And then suddenly this video emerges.
01:40 So clearly a lot of a bid here to show Prygozhin is going along with that deal, Boris.
01:45 Nick, you were able to ask the head of MI6 about the deal that Prygozhin struck with
01:52 Vladimir Putin.
01:53 What did he share with you?
01:54 Yeah, it was an interesting assessment, really, in that often when we hear the Kremlin speak
02:02 publicly, most of seasoned observers imagine that there's a different story behind closed
02:06 doors.
02:07 But Sir Richard Moore, the head of MI6, in a rare public speech here, said, look, from
02:11 what we've assessed with all the Western intelligence assets that we have available to us, actually
02:16 that public narrative of Prygozhin marching on Moscow, Lukashenko from Belarus intervening,
02:21 and Putin suddenly seems forgiving Putin in very short order over the days ahead, well,
02:27 that's actually what really happened.
02:28 There isn't a hidden private story that's more complex.
02:32 That was interesting.
02:33 He said that essentially Putin cut that deal with Prygozhin to, quote, save his own skin.
02:37 But he also used some kind of colourful metaphors to describe quite how Putin had flip-flopped
02:42 over Prygozhin.
02:43 Here's what he said.
02:47 He really didn't fight back against Prygozhin.
02:49 He cut a deal to save his skin using the good officers of the leader of Belarus.
02:56 So even I can't see inside Putin's head, but the only person who has been, well, the only
03:06 people who have been talking about escalation and nuclear weapons are Putin and a handful
03:13 of henchmen around him.
03:18 Now he says that while at breakfast, essentially, he'd called Prygozhin a traitor, by supper
03:25 he'd been pardoned, by a few days later he'd been invited into the Kremlin for tea.
03:29 That extraordinary flip-flopping we've seen from Putin, a sign of weakness and something
03:33 that repeatedly was compounded by this head of MI6 and a rare public assessment of really
03:39 what Western intelligence has known about that extraordinary weekend in Russia, Boris.
03:43 And it shows just how the Kremlin needs Prygozhin and needs Wagner forces in Ukraine, how little
03:49 progress they've made aside from Wagner.
03:52 Nick Paton-Walsh, thank you so much for the reporting.