Retired general reveals Putin’s ‘mistake’

Do you think it's safe to say that Putin has sided with his military leadership , with Shoyu with Gerasimov , at least for now .

And do you think that that is a mistake by Putin ?

You know , Alex , this is so complex .

Yes , it's a mistake .

Bottom line .

But Prayin is a symptom of a disease .

He is not the disease himself .

Mr Putin's government and the way he uses his military and the graft and the corruption of guys like Shoyu and Gerasimov who have been there for over a decade are more .

The disease itself is just symbolic of what is happening .

So when you're talking about trying to address these issues and to fix these things , Mr Putin just cannot do it because this is , this is inlaid within the government that is a kleptocratic authoritarian state that is not interested at all in conducting military operations properly or government activities properly .

Matt , I keep thinking about the rank and file Russian soldiers in the trenches in Ukraine .

How do you think this impacts the morale of those Russians in Ukraine ?

And then conversely , how does Ukraine take advantage ?

So I think the average soldier in the trench is under no illusions that the war is being badly managed and the leadership is terrible and is not looking out for their well being .

So the fact that Prego is bringing this uh not very well kept secret out into the light does not have much impact on the day to day struggle of the Russian soldier fighting in the trenches for his own survival .

Uh And as far as you know how this , how this plays out , um I mean , you got Chou uh still sitting in his office in Moscow and uh now uh Pergo is exiled off to Belarus or , or elsewhere .

So I imagine that Shoyu is probably his seat is safe for the near term .

Uh And then uh Pergo is gonna have to pick up the pieces and figure out how to move on from here , Bianna , we have talked about this sprawling Wagner Empire .

Prasin talked about the threat of Wagner ceasing to exist .

How much do you think what he's doing now is motivated by his business interests and his own personal gain .

I think quite a bit , Alex .

I mean , this to him and he's right is an existential threat in taking Wagner away from him , which is why it was the final straw and why he really lashed out the way he did .

The problem was there was really no plan b and I think he was quite surprised that he and Wagner were able to get as far as they did both in Rostov and obviously en route to Moscow , that having been said Wagner , which was a creation of Vladimir Putin's .

This is not a private mercenary group , but rather an arm of the Gru has for years worked to Putin's benefit as sort of a plausible deniability operation that was generating a lot of money outside of Russia as well in Africa in particular .

And that had made a very rich man that having been said he is very popular among the Wagner fighters , which is why you've seen at least according to Yevgeny Goin , he's attested that only one or 2% of them have actually signed up to go work for the Ministry of Defense .

He claims that he still has a lot of these fighters well trained and well armed fighters at that supporting him and Jill .

There have been some questions about whether Pra Gozin was being charged .

Russian state news is now reporting that the criminal case against Pra Gozin quote did not stop .

How do you see the situation ?

Well , I think once again the obfuscation about what really is going on kind of covers all bases .

We really don't know .

I think the most dangerous thing for Putin will be that appeal that Pri Gozin has kind of a populism against the elites because Putin is the elite , his government is the elites .

And so does he , you know , take care of them ?

Does he keep the Defense Minister in place .

Does he fire him ?

These are things that we're going to , it won't happen right now , but it could happen down the road and this is really destabilizing and very threatening to the entire system that Putin has .