WASHINGTON.- The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, assured this Sunday that the crisis after the rebellion of the group of Wagner mercenaries in Russia has not yet ended since the operation supposes a “direct challenge” against the authority of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
“We still haven’t seen the last act,” Blinken said in an interview this Sunday with the program. Face the Nationon CBS, in his first public comments on the Wagner rebellion led by the organization’s head, Yevgeni Progozhin.
The operation began late on Friday with the capture of the Russian city of Rostov, headquarters of the southern command of the Russian Army, with the intention of heading towards Moscow to ask the Ministry of Defense for explanations for allegedly killing its men in a bombardment. The Ministry denied any involvement.
Prigozhin’s convoy turned around on Saturday afternoon thanks to the mediation of Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko. The mercenaries were amnestied and in principle Prigozhin would be in Belarus, although there has been no news of him since his departure from Rostov last night.
“This situation raises very deep questions and shows real cracks (in the Kremlin). I don’t want to speculate how exactly this is going to end but Putin is going to have to answer a lot of questions between now and the next few weeks or months.”
Blinken confirmed that in the midst of the crisis, Russian and US officials maintained close contact to monitor the situation of US citizens in Russia and prevent them from being affected by the crisis.
“I directed my own team, at the behest of the president (Joe Biden), to engage with the Russians first and foremost to make sure they understood their responsibilities in terms of protecting our own personnel, ensuring their safety and well-being, as well as to any American citizen in Russia.”
For the rest, the Secretary of State indicated that in order to know exactly what will happen to Wagner’s forces based on the latest information that points to a possible integration into the Russian Army, “with what this entails for other parts of the world”, given the widespread presence of the group in Africa or Syria.
“In general, we are dealing with fundamentally internal issues that the Russians must solve, it is not our place to do that. It is up to us to make sure that Ukraine continues to have what it needs to defend itself and recover the territory that Russia has occupied there,” he stressed.
FUENTE: With information from EUROPA PRESS
