Wagner group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin's short-lived move against Moscow on Saturday was an "insurrection," and the agreement he reached to head to Belarus while his troops joined with Russia's military is not the end of the story, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul said Sunday.
"Prigozhin is the head leader of the Wagner group, the mercenary group that Putin has worked with," the Texas Republican said on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures." "They're the fiercest fighters, the only ones who won the battle of Bahkmut. The Ministry of Defense has been at war with Wagner, and Prigozhin didn't like that; so what happened was a march to Moscow."
The Wagner mercenaries are "50,000 of the fiercest thugs on the ground, and I think this will have a real impact on the fighting as Ukraine conducts its counteroffensive against the Russians," he added.
Meanwhile, the "internal insurrection" was aimed at the Russian Defense Ministry rather than President Vladimir Putin, but it still makes him "look like he can't control his own army and his own people," the congressman said.
That means that Chinese President Xi Jinping is likely having second thoughts about the alliance he's made with Putin, said McCaul, especially as Ukraine's counteroffensive is advancing.
McCaul also commented about Secretary of State Antony Blinken's recent trip to China, saying he gave up too much, such as sanctions on Huawei, "as a precondition" to have his meetings, and that is "not the way you conduct diplomacy and negotiation."
"This is not the way the former administration, Secretary [Mike] Pompeo, would have done this, certainly," he said. "That's not the way you negotiate. And, you know, as we look at the spy station in Cuba that we think Huawei and ZTE are involved in, for God's sake, we shouldn't be letting licenses from the United States go to Huawei and ZTE."
Blinken, also while in China, said the United States doesn't "'support an independent Taiwan,'" said McCaul, which angers him as he recently traveled there in support of the nation's people.
"We did get surrounded by an armada, battleships, 70 fighter jets. And then I got sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party, which I consider a badge of honor," he said. "But after doing all that, he comes on the heels of that and says we don't support an independent Taiwan. That's not consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act. He didn't have to say that, and I can't tell you what a blow that is to the people of Taiwan for a secretary of state to say we don't support your independence."
Meanwhile, McCaul on Sunday also blamed the Biden administration's "shameful" withdrawal from Afghanistan for many of China's expansions.
"They do this all over the place," he said. "They extract the rare earth minerals, and they'll take a port or a military base. They're in Afghanistan right now, and imagine that outcome in Afghanistan. They get a trillion dollars of lithium and access to Bagram airbase ... to abandon that only to see the Chinese come in is the biggest slap in the face to the veterans."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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