In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the US agency CIA is an opportunity as an opportunity to recruit spies. US CIA Director William Burns said on Saturday that the armed insurgency by mercenary Wagner group, chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was a challenge to Russia that showed the corrosive effect of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

President Putin this week thanked the army and security forces for averting what he said could turn into civil war, and compared the uprising to the chaos that gripped Russia in 1917. Was pushed in two revolutions.

Four months Prigozhin had been openly insulting Putin’s most senior military officers. He used a variety of foul language and prison slurs that puzzled top Russian officials, but Putin did not publicly respond to them.

Burns said in a lecture at Britain’s Ditchley Foundation, a non-profit foundation focused on US-British relations, in Oxfordshire, England, that it was surprising that Prigozhin had given the Kremlin’s fallacious rationale for invading Ukraine before his actions. And made a big allegation about the conduct of the war by the Russian military leadership. The impact of those words and those actions will last for some time, he said, but the Russia-Ukraine war provided a vivid example of Putin’s corrosive effect on his society and his regime.

Burns served as the US ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008 and was appointed CIA director in 2021. He described Prigozhin’s rebellion as an armed challenge to Russia. He said that the rebellion was an internal Russian affair in which the US had no role and would not play. Since an agreement was reached a week ago to end the insurgency, the Kremlin has tried to put on a show of calm, with Putin, 70, discussing tourism development, meeting crowds in Dagestan and discussing ideas for economic development. Was doing.

Dissent in Russia an opportunity to recruit spies: Burns

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday that the West need not worry about stability in the world’s biggest nuclear power as Russia would emerge stronger after the failed uprising. But Burns said the war was already a strategic failure for Russia, exposing its military weakness and hurting the Russian economy for years to come, while the NATO military alliance grows bigger and stronger.

Burns said Russia’s future as a junior partner and economic colony of China is being shaped by Putin’s mistakes. He said that discontent in Russia after the war in Ukraine was creating a rare opportunity to recruit spies and that the CIA could not let it go. Dissatisfaction with the war due to Russian propaganda and repression, Burns said, will continue to haunt the Russian leadership. This disagreement creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for those of us at the CIA, a human intelligence service at our core. We will not let it go to waste.