New cracks in Putin’s power

Transcript

NIALA BOODHOO: Good morning! Welcome to Axios Today! It’s Monday, June 26th. I’m Niala Boodhoo. Today: a long heatwave tests the power grid – and the people – of Texas. But first, is the world seeing new cracks in Putin’s power? That’s today’s One Big Thing.

Is the world seeing new cracks in Putin’s power

NIALA: Over the weekend, Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, led an armed uprising in Russia. It lasted just 24 hours before a deal with the Kremlin was reached, but it's the most serious threat to Russian president Vladimir Putin's rule since he first came to power more than two decades ago. Here's how U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken summed it up yesterday.

ANTONY BLINKEN: 16 months ago, Russian forces were on the doorstep of, uh, of Kiev Ukraine, thinking they were gonna take the city in a matter of days, erase the country from the map. Now, uh, they had to be focused on defending Moscow, Russia's capital against mercenaries of Putin's own making.

NIALA: That was Antony Blinken on CNN. Axios’ Senior World Reporter Dave Lawler is here to explain what was behind this and what this means for the Ukraine war. Hi Dave.

DAVE LAWLER: Hi, Niala.

NIALA: Can you give us a quick reminder first of what the Wagner Group is and its role not just in the war in Ukraine, but also in conflicts in Syria and in parts of Africa?

DAVE: Yeah, so this is a force of Russian mercenaries that has worked quite closely with the Russian state, you saw these mercenaries popping up, as you said, in Syria, uh, in parts of West Africa. Always in unstable countries, this is a group of, at various times, tens of thousands of recruits, uh, some of them former convicts from Russia, some of them sort of soldiers of fortune, and now they've played a pretty significant role in the fighting in Ukraine, particularly in this battle for Bakhmut, in which a lot of, uh, Wagner soldiers died. And that was part of the cause of the friction between Wagner and the official Russian military was the way that the fighting in Bakhmut went.

NIALA: They're led by Yevgeni Prigozhin. All weekend I've been seeing memes, making fun of him for being Putin's chef. But I also heard an expert say the best way to think of him was as an organized crime boss.

DAVE: Yeah, so Prigozhin spent a lot of the ‘80s in jail. He then connected with a young rising politician named Vladimir Putin in the ‘90s in St. Petersburg when he was working in the restaurant industry after Putin rose to power, as you said, he became known as Putin’s chef. That was mainly for all the catering contracts that he won. He became quite wealthy but also he's diversified his interests. So, a group that Prigozhin allegedly ran the internet research agency, was cited as one of the main organs of interference and disinformation, on behalf of Russia in the 2016 election.

And of course, he's now best known as the boss of the Wagner Group, he previously denied being the boss of the Wagner group. And all of a sudden, maybe six months ago, he started popping up in videos, declaring himself, almost in all alternative military leader to the official ones, the official chain of command. And he was challenging those guys, you know, saying that, “you don't know what you're doing.” And so, he went from kind of a back room operator to all of a sudden a very public figure. But that's a pretty recent phenomenon.

NIALA: And is that also what led to this rupture in this decades-long relationship with Vladimir Putin?

DAVE: Exactly. So he, he attacked basically everyone except Putin himself for the way that they were prosecuting the war in Ukraine. And he seemed to be betting that Putin might side with him and give him more control of the way the war was being fought. That isn't ultimately what happened. And then all of a sudden you had these really wild accusations Prigozhin made that there had been attacks on his troops and that they needed to now take matters into their own hands and restore order. And they started marching toward Moscow where there was the possibility of invasion on the capital of Russia but the fact that he would make this move, that was really imperiling Putin himself, I think, surprised a lot of observers.

NIALA: I wanna go back to what Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on CNN yesterday that maybe these are cracks in Putin's Russia. Does this empower people? I'm thinking of the thousands of everyday Russians who initially oppose the war.

DAVE: Yeah, so, so Niala, and he wasn't turned back by Russian forces, he stopped and pulled back, his troops were moving relatively freely through, you know, Russian highways, through Russian cities. For an autocrat, this is certainly a sign of weakness, the question that you raise about the people who oppose the war, so far that Kremlin has done quite a good job keeping most of the population as far as we can tell, in line around this narrative that Russia had no choice but to prosecute this war, and that NATO are really the aggressors here.

But now you have a fight between different armed factions inside Russia. Is it a bit harder to sell that at home? I can't tell from here, but it's certainly a chink in the armor for Vladimir Putin. So, you know, other things that we're watching, of course, Russia had to move some forces around to try to block off this, this Wagner offensive. And of course, Wagner has pulled its forces out of Ukraine. So are there some gaps in the lines there that the Ukrainians might, potentially try to exploit in the coming days?

Uh, there is a possibility that this has repercussions for the war in Ukraine. Also in terms of morale you now have, Russian forces being told that there's a threat to the homeland, not just, in the neighboring country in which they are, you know, currently fighting a war. So, what that does for, for the morale and the organizational structure of the Russian force, also remains to be seen.

NIALA: Axios’ Dave Lawler. Thanks Dave.

DAVE: Thanks, Niala.

NIALA: In a moment, the heat in Texas expands and worsens.

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A long heatwave tests the power grid – and the people – of Texas

NIALA: Welcome back to Axios Today, I'm Niala Boodhoo.

Scorching temperatures are plaguing Texas as the state enters its third week of a record-breaking heat wave. The weather's putting a strain on Texas's power grid, thousands are without power and air conditioning as temperatures reach the triple digits. And the National Weather Service is predicting the dangerous heat will continue into next week. Axios’ Andrew Freedman is here with the big picture.

Andrew, when we say extreme heat, how hot are we talking about and where exactly?

ANDREW FREEDMAN: This is actually breaking not just daily records, but all time records. Along the Rio Grande, so down closer to the Mexican border, the temperatures are well into the triple digits, so they've flirted with the state's all time record high, which is 120. So we've seen 118, 119 degrees so far. Many cities in Texas have now already gone their maximum number of hours per year that they would normally see heat indices as high as they've seen.And, the heat going for such a long period of time really wears people down even among the healthy groups, not just talking about the elderly or the young or the sick.

NIALA: How is this extreme weather affecting Texas's power grid?

ANDREW: The power grid in Texas is famously problematic, but what they've done since the winter storm that knocked it out a couple years ago, really is actually build up some battery storage and renewables, especially solar. So, when power plants have clicked off for one reason or another, this has happened in the past couple weeks, they've been able to call upon the energy stored in battery storage to keep that power flowing. Now they're gonna be tested a little bit more this week. But they're not warning of a definite problem meeting demand.

NIALA: Andrew, we should point out it isn't just Texas. The National Weather Service said yesterday, more than 55 million people are under heat alerts from the southwest through the southern plains and into the Mississippi Valley?

ANDREW: Yeah, the number varies, every time you look at it, but it is expanding. So think about going all the way from New Mexico to Arkansas as well as eventually up into possibly as far north as Iowa, and then also encompassing parts of the plains. So, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, likely in it as well.

NIALA: I wanna ask you how human-caused climate change is affecting all of this?

ANDREW: Yeah. So we know that climate change is causing this to be much worse than it otherwise would be. There's been some quick analyses done that show that the temperatures are five times, at least five times more likely to be at this level than they would've been in a world without all this added greenhouse gas emissions.

NIALA: Andrew Freedman covers weather, climate, and energy for Axios. Thanks Andrew.

ANDREW: Thanks for having me.

NIALA: One last thing before we go… today marks 8 years since the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the U.S., ending a ban in 14 states. And according to U.S. Census data, the number of same-sex households has gone up 30% since the ruling: the most recent census data estimates there are 1.2 million same-sex couple households — of which 59% are married.

That’s it for us today! I’m Niala Boodhoo - thanks for listening - stay safe and we’ll see you back here tomorrow morning.