WASHINGTON— US President Joe Biden said Wednesday he believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “clearly losing the war at home.”

Speaking to reporters at the White House before Marine One departure, Biden said Putin “has become a bit of a pariah around the world. And it’s not just NATO; it’s not just the European Union. It’s Japan. It’s you know, it’s 40 nations.”

President Biden was commenting on the revolt led by chief of Wagner military group Yevgeny Prigozhin against the Russian forces last Saturday several months after direct involvement in the war in Ukraine.

President Biden told CNN on Wednesday his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin has “absolutely” been weakened by the short-lived mutiny over the weekend.

It was his most definitive comment to date on how the rebellion by Wagner Group affected the Russian leader’s stature.

Biden and his team have been cautious in commenting on the events, wary of providing Putin pretext for claiming a western plot to oust him. But on Wednesday, Biden expanded on his views of Putin’s diminished stature.

Asked whether the Russian president had been weakened, Biden said: “Absolutely.” Later, expanding on the extent of Putin’s weakness, Biden said it was difficult to ascertain.

Asked again if Putin is weaker today than he was last week, Biden said: “I know he is.”

Earlier this week, Biden sought to distance the United States from the weekend rebellion in Russia, insisting in his first public remarks since the episode that the West had nothing to do with the mutiny.

Still, American intelligence agencies were able to determine ahead of time that Prigozhin was preparing to challenge the Russian military, a sign of how closely the US had been monitoring tensions between Moscow and the Wagner boss.

Speaking from the White House, Biden suggested it was too early to say how the situation would unfold going forward.

“It’s still too early to reach a definitive conclusion about where this is going,” he said in the East Room.

“The ultimate outcome of all this remains to be seen, but no matter what comes next I will keep making sure that our allies and our partners are closely aligned in how we are reading and responding to the situation.”

Biden has spoken to the leaders of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and Italy since the events over the weekend. He also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

On a similar note, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “this is a moving picture. But I think we can say this or at least we know this much; first, if you take a step back, it is genuinely extraordinary that we’ve gone from a place where we were 16 months ago where you had Russian forces on the outskirts of Kyiv, they thought they would take the city in a matter of days.”

“They (the Russians) thought they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country to a place where we were this weekend where you had forces moving on Russia’s capital, Moscow, mercenaries of Putin’s own making.

“That in a way encapsulates the extent to which this aggression against Ukraine has been a failure across the board for Putin,” Secretary Blinken said a conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York.

“And we see it by virtually every metric. Russia is worse off economically, it’s worse off militarily, its standing in the world has plummeted. It’s managed to wean Europe off of Russian energy in the space of a little over a year.

“It’s managed to help NATO become stronger, more united, and bigger. And of course, it’s managed to alienate, virtually every Ukrainian and also unite Ukraine as never before.

“This last episode showing, to some extent, the internal dimensions of this failure I think speaks volumes.

“But I don’t want to predict where this is going to go, when it’s going to get there. I do know that Putin has a lot of new questions that he has to answer for,” Blinken added.

Earlier, Blinken said that Prigozhin’s rebellion could be beneficial to Ukraine’s counteroffensive. “To the extent that Moscow is distracted by its own internal divisions, that may help,” Blinken said in an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“To the extent that the Wagner forces themselves are no longer on the front lines, that could help, because they have been effective. They just literally throw people into a meat grinder of Putin’s own making, but that’s had some effect,” Blinken said. — Agencies