Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Monday, June 26. I'm Nile Booty. Today, a long

heat wave tests the power grid in the people of Texas. But first, is the world seeing new

cracks in Putin's power? That's today's one big thing.

Over the weekend, Wagner Group boss Yavgaini Purgoshen 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.

16 months ago, Russian forces were on the doorstep of key viewcrain, thinking they were going

to take the city in a matter of days, erase the country from the map. Now, they had to

be focused on defending Moscow, Russia's capital against mercenaries of Putin's own

making. That was Antony Blinken on CNN. Axios, a senior world reporter, Dave Loller, is

here to explain what was behind this and what this means for the Ukraine war. Hi, Dave.

Hi, Nile. Can you give us a quick reminder first of what the Wagner Group is in its role,

not just in the war in Ukraine, but also in conflicts in Syria and in parts of Africa?

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, in parts of West Africa,

always in unstable countries. This is a group of at various times, tens of thousands of

recruits, 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 Bakmut, in which a lot of 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 Bakmut went. They're led by Evgeny Pregozion. All weekend,

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