(Reuters) – U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns said on Saturday that the armed mutiny by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin had shown the corrosive effect on Russia of President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
“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, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, said in a lecture to Britain’s Ditchley Foundation in Oxfordshire, England.
“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 cast the mutiny as an “armed challenge to the Russian state” but said it was an “internal Russian affair in which the United States has had and will have no part.”
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
