US Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns said Thursday that he remains optimistic Ukraine will be able to make advances its counteroffensive against Russia, based on the intelligence he has reviewed.
Russia suffers from some significant “structural weaknesses” behind the considerable defenses it has built up, Burns said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. Those weaknesses include poor morale, poor generalship and “disarray” among its political and military leadership.
“It is going to be a tough slog, but we’re going to do everything we can as an intelligence agency to provide the kind of intelligence support and sharing that’s going to help the Ukrainians to make progress,” Burns said.
Burns said that mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in June had “exposed some of the significant weaknesses in the system that Putin has built.”
“For a lot of Russians watching this used to this image of Putin as the arbiter of order, the question was does the emperor have no clothes or at least why does it take so long for him to get dressed,” Burns said.
Burns’ comments echoed remarks earlier this week by Sir Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, known at MI6. Moore said that Putin’s government was beset by “venality, infighting and callous incompetence” and that the aftermath of Prigozhin’s mutiny had been “humiliating” to Putin.
Putin will likely try to avoid giving the impression that he is overreacting to the mutiny, while trying to extract what he can of value from Prigozhin’s Wagner network, Burns said. Still, Burns said Prigozhin is likely to see retribution from Putin at some point.
“Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback,” Burns said. “If I were Prigozhin, I wouldn’t fire my food taster.”
Burns said the mutiny presented a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for CIA recruitment in Russia. The agency recently made its first video post on Telegram, the social media and messaging site developed and widely used in Russia, to let Russians know how to contact it on the “dark web.” Burns said the video was viewed 2.5 million times in the week after it was posted.
Burns, a diplomat before becoming the CIA chief, has emerged as a key back-channel for the Biden administration’s thorny relationships with Russia and China. He went to Moscow before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in an attempt to talk Putin’s government out of attacking and, more recently, traveled to Beijing in a bid to keep intelligence channels with China open.
Burns said that CIA has “made progress” in rebuilding its intelligence network in China after setbacks in the country. “We’ve made progress and we’re working very hard over recent years to ensure that we have a strong human intelligence capability to complement what we can do through other methods,” Burns said.
CIA launched a China Mission Center in 2021 to hone the agency’s focus on “an increasingly adversarial Chinese government.”
Burns added that Chinese President Xi Jinping and his military leadership likely “have doubts about whether they could pull off a successful full-scale invasion of Taiwan at an acceptable cost to them,” Burns said. Putin’s experience in Ukraine has “probably reinforced some of those doubts,” he said.