Putin thinks he'll break America's will in Ukraine, but he's wrong, says the CIA director
Putin thinks the Russian military’s attrition strategy in Ukraine will break the will of the U.S.-led alliance, but he's wrong, says CIA head William Burns.
Vladimir Putin believes the Russian military’s scaled-down attrition strategy in Ukraine will grind down Ukrainian forces and break the will of the U.S.-led alliance — but he is wrong, CIA Director William Burns said Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum.
“Putin’s view of Americans is that we always suffer from attention deficit disorder, and we’ll get distracted by something else,” Burns said during a live-streamed interview with Andrea Mitchell of NBC News. “My own strong view is that Putin was wrong in his assumptions about breaking the alliance and breaking Ukrainian will before the war began, and I think he is just as wrong now.”
After a disastrous start to the war based on a series of flawed assumptions, Russia has settled into its traditional method of war in Ukraine’s eastern region, Burns said — directing massive artillery and air strikes against cities, without regard to civilian casualties.
Russia has had some success, he said, advancing six to 10 miles across a narrow strip of land in the Donbas region. But the gains have come at great cost. The U.S. estimates that as many as 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed and three times as many wounded, he said. He said Ukrainian casualties are believed to be nearly as high.
“In one of my recent conversations with one of my Ukrainian counterparts, he pointed out that the dumb Russians were all dead,” Burns said. “And I think what he meant by that [is]…the Russians have adapted…Putin has shrunk his objectives.”
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