Wagner mutiny shows damage Putin has done to Russia – CIA director
U.S. CIA Director William Burns said that the armed mutiny by Wagner PMC leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was a challenge to the Russian state that had shown the corrosive effect of President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine.
That’s according to Reuters, Ukrinform reports.
"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 U.S.-British relations - in Oxfordshire, England.
The CIA Director added the mutiny was an "internal Russian affair in which the United States has had and will have no part."
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.
"Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression. 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,” Burns said.
As reported, on June 23, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, announced a démarche against the Russian military leadership, in particular against Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
On June 24, the self-proclaimed president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko held talks with Prigozhin. Following the talks, the private army's leader announced he was turning his forces around from a march toward Moscow.
Putin, in turn, said that the Wagner fighters could sign a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense or go to Belarus.
The spokesman for the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, Andriy Demchenko, said that Belarus can accommodate about 8,000 mercenaries of the Wagner PMC on its territory, the development of the situation is under Ukraine’s constant control.