US Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns said on Saturday that disaffection in Russia with the war in Ukraine was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to recruit spies - and that his agency was not letting it go to waste.
"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 US ambassador to Moscow, said in a lecture to Britain's Ditchley Foundation in Oxfordshire, England.
"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."
CIA director: Wagner mutiny shows damage Putin has done to Russia
Burns also said 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 said.
"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."