Tom Williams/Pool/Reuters
Marking the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, CIA director William Burns said Russian President Vladimir Putin was “entirely too confident” in thinking he could force the steadfast nation into surrender.
Burns sat down with CBS’s Margaret Brennan, where he discussed the intelligence community’s perspective on Russia’s plan forward in the war. He said his conversations with Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, were “dispiriting,” and that Russia displayed an arrogance that didn’t mirror Ukraine’s persistent defense.
“It was a defiant attitude on the part of Mr. Naryshkin as well a sense of cockiness and hubris, reflecting Putin’s own view,” he said. “He believes he can grind down the Ukrainians and wear down our European allies, that political fatigue will eventually set in. In my view, Putin’s view of Americans we’ve got attention deficit disorder and we’ll move on to another issue eventually. Putin, in many ways, I think, believes today that he cannot win for a while, but he can’t lose.”