Moscow’s war in Ukraine has had a “corrosive” effect on Russian President Vladimir Putin, CIA Director William Burns said on Saturday, with discontent over the conflict creating a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for the spy agency.
Speaking at the Ditchley Foundation in the UK, Burns called Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “the most immediate and acute geopolitical challenge to international order today.”
The address came one week after Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin led his forces in a brief mutiny against Russia’s military command.
Photo: AFP
In doing so, he accused Russia of targeting his forces with deadly missile strikes in Ukraine and launched broadsides against Moscow’s narrative of the conflict: saying it was started “for the self-promotion of a bunch of bastards” and that Russia’s troops were retreating in Ukraine’s east and south.
“The impact of those words and those actions will play out for some time, a vivid reminder of the corrosive effect of Putin’s war on his own society and his own regime,” Burns said.
He called the war a “strategic failure” for Moscow that has exposed military weaknesses, hurt the economy and spurred a bigger and stronger NATO.
Russia’s “future as a junior partner and economic colony of China” was being shaped “by Putin’s mistakes,” Burns said.
“Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership ... That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA,” he said.
“We’re not letting it go to waste,” he said, adding that the CIA recently posted on Telegram to let Russians know how to reach the US spy agency through the dark Web. “We had 2.5 million views in the first week, and we’re very much open for business.”
Burns did not mention a recent trip to Ukraine where he met with intelligence counterparts and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The visit took place before Prigozhin’s insurrection.
The spy chief also addressed China, which he called “the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do so.”
Burns warned of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) “growing repression at home and his aggressiveness abroad,” and said that the CIA had established a mission center focused exclusively on China and more than doubled the percentage of overall budget on the country’s activities.
“In today’s world, no country wants to find itself at the mercy of a ‘cartel of one’ for critical minerals and technologies,” Burns said of China. “The answer to that is not to decouple from an economy like China’s, which would be foolish, but to sensibly de-risk and diversify by securing resilient supply chains, protecting our technological edge and investing in industrial capacity.”
Additional reporting by Reuters
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