The Know Daily - Monday 26 June 2023

_{Read in 5m 24s ∙ Listening to Hozier}

Environmental campaigners are celebrating the fact that Brits have embraced refillable water bottles. According to the anti-disposables campaign Refill, just 20% of people in the UK used a refillable water bottle in 2015. Nowadays, that figure is more like 60%. The refillable water bottle market is expected to grow by almost 40% over the next five years, while increasing numbers of free-to-use public water taps are being installed. We’ll drink to that! 🚰 

🇷🇺 What’s going on in Russia?

Over the weekend, Russian mercenary group Wagner marched on Moscow before turning back at the last moment, raising questions about President Vladimir Putin's grip on power. Here’s what you need to know.

First things first - who are the Wagner group?
The self-titled “private military company” has fought alongside the Russian army since the start of the war in Ukraine. Formed in 2014 and led by Yevgeny Prigozhin - previously one of Putin’s closest allies - the group has intervened in other conflicts around the world.

“Wagner has been accused of committing human rights abuses in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Mali and Mozambique,” explained The Independent.

So what happened this weekend?
On Friday, Prigozhin accused the Russian military leadership of depriving his troops of ammunition and the Kremlin of lying to the public about its justifications for invading Ukraine.

On Saturday morning, Prigozhin claimed that Wagner soldiers had seized control of all military sites in the tactically-significant Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. Prigozhin’s armoured convoy then set out for Moscow, and civilians in the capital were told to stay at home.

But later that day, Prigozhin had agreed to turn his forces around and not march on Moscow. Under a deal brokered by the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of Putin, Prigozhin was exiled from Russia but will not face charges of treason.

The apparent insurrection was “the most serious challenge to [Putin’s] authority since he came to power over 20 years ago,” reported CNN.

How will this impact Ukraine?
In short, we still don’t know - although it likely won’t change the course of the war in the short-term.

“A sudden uprising in Russia was over too fast to have any immediate impact on the war in Ukraine, but it exposed a fragility in Moscow that Kyiv will seek to exploit,” reported Sky News.