LONDON: The US’ Director of CIA William Burns on Saturday said that mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s armed mutiny can be construed as a challenge to Russia that has brought to light the eroding effect of President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Burns also said that post Prigozhin’s mutiny, Russian people were becoming critical of the Ukraine war, creating a unique opportunity to recruit spies for CIA and that it won’t be allowed to go waste.
Earlier this week, Putin had thanked the army and other security forces for avoiding what he feared could have evolved into a civil war, comparing the ‘armed mutiny’ to the bedlam that led to Russia being plunged into two revolutions in 1917.
Prigozhin had for months been openly heaping insults on Putin's senior- most military leaders, letting loose a barrage of crude expletives and prison slang that left top Russian officials shocked but went unanswered by Putin in public.
During a lecture in Oxfordshire, England to Britain's Ditchley Foundation, a non-profit foundation which aims at US-British relations, Burns said, "It is striking that Prigozhin preceded his actions with a scathing indictment of the Kremlin's mendacious rationale for the invasion of Ukraine and of the Russian military leadership's conduct of the war.”
He explained that the impact of Prigozhin words and actions will continue to remain for some time as a vivid memory of the destructive effect of Putin's war on his own society and his own regime.
Burns had served from 2005 to 2008 as US ambassador to Russia and then appointed as CIA director in 2021. He cast Prigozhin's actions as an armed mutiny aimed at the Russian state.
He termed the mutiny as an "internal Russian affair in which the United States has had and will have no part."
Since a deal to end the mutiny was struck a week ago, the Kremlin has been seeking to project calm and the 70-year-old Putin has been discussing tourism development, meeting people in Dagestan, as well as discussing economic development ideas.
Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday that the country will emerge as a stronger one after the failed mutiny and that the West should not have worries regarding stability in the world's biggest nuclear power.
On the other hand, Burns said that the Ukraine war has turned out to be a strategic failure for Russia, bringing to light its military weakness and causing damage to the Russian economy for future years, even as the NATO military alliance was becoming bigger and stronger.
He also said disenchantment of people in Russia with the Ukraine war was creating a unique opportunity to recruit spies for CIA and that it won’t be allowed to go waste.
In May, the Kremlin informed that its agencies were keeping track of Western spy activity after a video was published by the CIA, which encouraged Russians to use a secure internet channel to make contact.
The short video in Russian contained a text message saying that the spy agency wanted to hear from military officers, intelligence specialists, diplomats, scientists and people with information about Russia's economy and its leadership.
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