![\"CIA](\"https:\/\/c.ndtvimg.com\/2021-01\/d6mur14g_william-burns_625x300_12_January_21.jpg\"\/ "\\"CIA")
<\/div>\nCIA’s William Burns said the war had already been a strategic failure for Russia. (FILE)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
US CIA Director William Burns said on Saturday that the armed mutiny by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was a challenge to the Russian state that had shown the corrosive effect of President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Putin this week thanked the army and security forces for averting what he said could have turned into a civil war, and has compared the mutiny to the chaos that plunged Russia into two revolutions in 1917.<\/p>\n
For months, Prigozhin had been openly insulting Putin’s most senior military men, using a variety of crude expletives and prison slang that shocked top Russian officials but were left unanswered in public by Putin.<\/p>\n
“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,” Burns said in a lecture to Britain’s Ditchley Foundation – a non-profit foundation focused on US-British relations – in Oxfordshire, England.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Burns, who served as US ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008 and was appointed CIA director in 2021, cast Prigozhin’s mutiny as an “armed challenge to the Russian state”.<\/p>\n
He said the mutiny was an “internal Russian affair in which the United States has had and will have no part.”<\/p>\n
Since a deal was struck a week ago to end the mutiny, the Kremlin has sought to project calm, with the 70-year-old Putin discussing tourism development, meeting crowds in Dagestan, and discussing ideas for economic development.<\/p>\n
CIA RECRUITMENT<\/strong><\/p>\n Russia will emerge stronger after the failed mutiny so the West need not worry about stability in the world’s biggest nuclear power, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday.<\/p>\n But Burns said that the war had already been a strategic failure for Russia by laying bare its military weakness and damaging the Russian economy for years to come, while the NATO military alliance was growing bigger and stronger.<\/p>\n Burns said Russia’s “future as a junior partner and economic colony of China” was being shaped “by Putin’s mistakes.”<\/p>\n He said disaffection in Russia with the war in Ukraine was creating a rare opportunity to recruit spies – and the CIA was not letting it pass.<\/p>\n “Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression,” Burns said.<\/p>\n “That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at the CIA – at our core a human intelligence service. We’re not letting it go to waste.”<\/p>\n The Kremlin said in May that its agencies were tracking Western spy activity after the CIA published a video encouraging Russians to make contact via a secure internet channel.<\/p>\n The short video in Russian was accompanied by a text saying the agency wanted to hear from military officers, intelligence specialists, diplomats, scientists and people with information about Russia’s economy and its leadership.<\/p>\n (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n