a good sunday evening to you. i m jim sciutto. and welcome back to cnn special live coverage of the russian rebellion that erupted without warning and ended quickly this weekend not long after it began. yet and we should be clear the world is only beginning to assess the fallout. there are growing questions tonight about vladimir putin s leadership going forward and whether his iron grip on russia is weakening. the crash site of a russian military plane reportedly brought down by the wagner group yesterday. the cause of the crash not clear. but footage indicates the aircraft had been struck by a missile or rocket. there s still no sign of vladimir s leader, yevgeny prigozhin, who led this march on russia, af he cut a deal to go into belarus. also not seen, putin. we re going to have the latest on the white house reaction and president biden s conversation today with ukraine s leader. first, though, an update from cnn s matthew chance, who is in moscow. reporter: jim,
singapore, this is bbc news. it is newsday. welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to viewers in the uk and around the world. we begin with an exclusive interview with the wife and mother of two of the british passengers lost in the titan sub disaster in the north atlantic last week. the submersible was on its way to view the wreck of the titanic when contact was lost and the vessel imploded. christine dawood, the wife of shahzada dawood and the mother of 19 year old suleman dawood, was on the polar prince, which was supervising the mission. christine dawood has been speaking to the bbc s nomia iqbal in stjohn s, newfoundland from where the expedition had set off. thank you forjoining me. i can t imagine the pain of losing two family members on this journey. losing two family members on this journey- this “ourney. that s right. but it this journey. that s right. but it was one this journey. that s right. but it was one of this journey. that s right. but it was one of those
show you one video in particular. this shows what is believed to be a russian helicopter by a main road here and you can see that it opens fire on what is believed to be a wagner target. we don t know that for sure but you can see just hear the explosion and the aftermath of it. the video itself we have managed to verify as you can see the helicopter there. there is another video to which we have managed to verify and that we believe is from the same spot the m4 motorway. you can see someone filming out the window. there is the roadside. and just hear the burnt out wreckage of the strike. hard to work out what exactly that was but certainly these two things taken together give us more information about what happened. let mejust information about what happened. let me just show you what we did using google street view. you can see, quite distinctive, isn t it, the residential block there with yellow and blue? that matches the first video we saw so that helped us. also, there were the
back around, and we re going back to the field camps. it s remarkable it would be the equivalent of a militia driving up i-95 and getting within 100 miles of washington, d.c. we know u.s. officials were concerned about what an open military conflict would look like in russia. what i was told was there was a u.s. assessment. what they expected as the wagner troops started moving north was a lot more resistance, fierce fighting. i was told by a u.s. official, a lot more bloodshed. that, of course, did not come to pass. there was a real surprise on the american side that the professional army didn t come out to face them down. we didn t really see fsb troops or any of those border guards. so, they were surprised about that. and they were surprised about the suddenness of the deal that was apparently brokened by alexander lukashenko, which is going to see prigozhin ending up in belarus.
own reporting, that prigozhin was planning something of concern, he was planning an open military conflict with russia. officials will grant this is like the old churchill quote, mystery wrapped in enigma and so on. does the u.s. have good vision into what s actually happening in russia? it appears that u.s. intelligence had some foresight into what was going to happen here in terms of the growing conflict between yevgeny prigozhin and the russian military. it s interesting prigozhin suddenly used this as an excuse to say things were turning south for him and his forces, when that was not the case. there had been concern and frustration that this counteroffensive wasn t going as quickly as ukraine had hoped. so, the speculation, perhaps, is that yevgeny prigozhin was concerned and knew that his days in terms of ruling and controlling with wagner group were numbered.