(Reuters) – U.S. CIA Director William Burns on Saturday called the mutiny of Wagner militia leader Yevgeny Prigozhin an “armed challenge” to the Russian state illustrating the corrosive nature of Vladimir Putin’s war in Russia. Ukraine.
The Russian president this week thanked the military and security forces that he said helped avert what could have turned into a civil war, even referring to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
For months, Yevgeny Prigojine insulted Russian army officers, with no reaction from Vladimir Putin.
Last weekend’s episode in Russia is “a stark reminder of the corrosive effect of Putin’s war on his own society and his own regime”, said William Burns during a conference at the British Ditchley Foundation – non-profit organization focused on US-UK relations.
“The impact of these words and actions will be felt for some time to come,” he also said in Oxfordshire, England.
US Ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008 who became director of the CIA in 2021, Williams Burns described the mutiny as an “armed challenge to the Russian state”, also judging that it was an “internal affair in which the United States has had and will have no part”.
Since an agreement was reached a week ago to end the mutiny, the Kremlin has sought to restore calm, with Vladimir Putin concerned in particular with tourism and economic development.
Russia will emerge stronger from the failed mutiny, and the West need not worry about the stability of the world’s largest nuclear power, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday.
In the opinion of William Burns, however, the disaffection of some Russians vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine created an opportunity to recruit spies that the CIA could not pass up. (Report Guy Faulconbridge; French version Elizabeth Pineau)
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