An anonymous source ‘leaked’ information about a secret meeting between CIA Director William Burns and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his senior officials.
That sounds reliable – anonymous source, leaked, secret-not-secret meeting.
Ukraine Plans to Strike Near Crimea
In a CIA leak to the CIA’s favorite paper, The Washington Post, during a secret trip by Burns to Ukraine, Ukrainian officials and President Zelensky told the CIA Director of Ukraine’s ambition to cut off Crimea.
Kiev authorities told Burns about Ukraine’s plans to deploy artillery and missiles near Crimea for possible strikes as leverage. They want to negotiate from strength. [Pipe dream?]
In agreeing not to take Crimea by force, Kyiv would then demand that Russia accept whatever security guarantees Ukraine can secure from the West, said Ukrainian officials.
According to the WaPo article, “Russia will only negotiate if it feels threatened,” said a senior Ukrainian official.
That’s a risky assumption. If Trump said any of this, they’d charge him with espionage and leaking classified information.
U.S. CIA 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. He’s not letting it go to waste and said it in public.
According to Reuters, “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.
“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,” reports Reuters.
I guess he wants Russia to think he has spies placed everywhere?
Burns also said that the armed mutiny by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was a challenge to the Russian state that had shown the corrosive effect of President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Prigozhin had been openly insulting Putin’s most senior military men for months. Remarkably, Putin said nothing publicly.
“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 the lecture to Britain’s Ditchley Foundation.
“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.”
On the other hand, another theory I’ve heard is that Russians like the way Putin handled it. They like Prigozhin and the Wagner Group. This was the peaceful end to the march to Moscow most Russians wanted to see.
Who knows what the truth is? Can anyone explain the strategy here?