On Saturday, U.S. CIA Director William Burns called mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s violent revolt a challenge to the Russian state that showed the corrosive effects of President Vladimir Putin’s conflict in Ukraine.
Putin hailed the army and security personnel this week for preventing a civil war and compared the mutiny to the 1917 instability that led to two revolutions.
For months, Prigozhin had publicly insulted Putin’s top military officers with crude expletives and prison slang, shocking top Russian officials but going unanswered by Putin.
“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 Oxfordshire, England’s Ditchley Foundation, a non-profit focused on U.S.-British relations.
“The impact of those words and those actions will play out for some time – a vivid reminder of Putin’s war’s corrosive effect on his own society and regime.”
Burns, U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008 and CIA director in 2021, called Prigozhin’s insurrection an “armed challenge to the Russian state.”
He called the mutiny an “internal Russian affair in which the United States has had and will have no part.”
Since a week-old accord ended the mutiny, the Kremlin has worked to project calm, with Putin, 70, addressing tourism development, visiting audiences in Dagestan, and discussing economic development.
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