The director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) William Burns said the ongoing dissatisfaction with Russia's war in Ukraine provides a rare opportunity to recruit spies.
"Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression," Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, said in a lecture to Britain's Ditchley Foundation in Oxfordshire, England on Saturday.
"That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA, at our core a human intelligence service. We're not letting it go to waste."
Burns cast the recent mutiny by the Wagner Group as an "armed challenge to the Russian state."
He said the mutiny was an "internal Russian affair in which the United States has had and will have no part."
Since a deal was struck a week ago to end the mutiny, the Kremlin has sought to project calm, with the 70-year-old Putin discussing tourism development, meeting crowds in Dagestan, and discussing ideas for economic development.
Russia will emerge stronger after the failed mutiny so the West need not worry about stability in the world's biggest nuclear power, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday.
