Washington.- The Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelensky, claimed that Vladimir Putin’s response to the Wagner Group’s attempted rebellion was weak and assured that the Russian leader is losing control of his own people.
In an interview done this Sunday by CNN, the president declared that “all that vertical power” that Putin used to have “is crumbling.”
“We see Putin’s reaction. He is weak,” Zelensky told CNN journalist Erin Burnett in Odessa, in an interview that will be published in its entirety on Wednesday and some fragments of which have been broadcast on Monday.
On June 24, some soldiers from the Wagner group, led by Yevgueni Prigozhin, they started an uprising and after declaring themselves in rebellion they occupied the city of Rostov on Don and sent four columns to Moscow.
A day later, the leader of the Wagner group himself announced his withdrawal, after the mediation of the Belarusian leader Alekandr Lukashenko, and the return of his combatants to the permanent bases. Following an agreement with the Kremlin, Prigozhin moved to Belarus and there can be no charges against him.
Prigozhin’s declared objective, which he did not achieve, was the dismissal of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Valery Gerasimov, whom he has for months been responsible for the military setbacks in Ukraine and the high number of casualties among the Russian forces.
In Zelensky’s opinion, what happened shows that Putin “does not control everything.” «The fact that Wagner goes deep into Russia and takes over certain regions shows how easy it is to do. Putin does not control the situation in the regions,” Zelensky said in the interview.
The Ukrainian president stated that while Kiev’s efforts have focused on regaining territory in southern and eastern Ukraine, its ultimate goal is to liberate Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
“We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea. And while Crimea is under Russian occupation, it only means one thing: the war is not over yet,” she said.
If the territory is not liberated, he added, it cannot be considered a victory.
