CIA head accuses Russian spy chief of ‘cockiness’ and ‘hubris’ after ‘dispiriting’ recent meeting

William Burns says Vladimir Putin’s closed inner-circle could be leading him into ‘blunders’

CIA Director William Burns said that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his spy chief showed "hubris" and "cockiness" after recent discussions with Moscow, but warned that such attitudes could lead to "blunders" for authoritarian leaders.

Mr Burns sat for a wide-ranging interview with CBS News' Margaret Brennan and revealed his perspective on the Russian leaders' attitude.

Brennan noted that Mr Putin has "about three or four people" who knew he was planning the invasion of Ukraine last year. Mr Burns confirmed it was true, saying Mr Putin has been narrowing the number of people who have direct access to his planning, often prioritising "loyalty over competence."

"It was a group of people who tended to tell him what he wanted to hear, and- or at least had learned over the years that it wasn't career enhancing to question his judgments as well," Mr Burns said. "And so that was one of the deepest flaws I think, in Russian decision-making just before the war as it was such a close circle of people reinforcing one another's profoundly mistaken assumptions."

When asked if any of his inner circle give him counsel, Mr Burns said he believes that Mr Putin has "become increasingly convinced that he knows better than anyone else what's at stake for Russia."

Brennan asked the CIA director about recent discussions he had with Russian officials, noting that he had called them "dispiriting."

Mr Burns said Sergey Naryshkin, the director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, has had a "very defiant attitude”, with a "sense of cockiness and hubris”.

He said that hubris was apparent in what he believes to be Mr Putin's miscalculations ahead of his invasion of Ukraine last year.

"He believed that Ukraine was weak and divided, he thought the West was distracted, and he thought he had modernized the Russian military to the point where it was capable of a quick, decisive victory," he said. "Of course, it turned out that each of those assumptions was profoundly flawed."

Sergey Naryshkin, then-State Duma Speaker and now head of the SVR foreign intelligence service, with Vladimir Putin at a wreath-laying ceremony in Moscow in 2016 (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The CIA chief said that despite those flawed assumptions, Mr Putin is convinced he can grind down the Ukrainian forces over time and that Americans will eventually lose interest in supporting Kyiv's defence efforts.

"[Mr Putin] believes he can grind down the Ukrainians, that he can wear down our European allies, that political fatigue will eventually set in. And in my experience, Putin's view of Americans, of us, has been that we have attention deficit disorder, and we'll move on to some other issue eventually," Mr Burns said. "And so Putin, in many ways, I think, believes today that he cannot win for a while, but he can't afford to lose. I mean, that's his conviction."

Brennan noted that Russia had suffered significant casualties in Ukraine, calling it a "meat grinder" for Moscow's military, which includes a significant portion of conscripts, and asked if that had sobered Mr Putin at all.

The CIA head said that Mr Putin is "certainly not a sentimentalist about the loss of Russian life," but said that there was still "a lot of hubris that continues to be attached to Putin and his view of the war."

William Burns (Getty Images)

However, Mr Burns said that such "hubris" and power consolidation could also blind Mr Putin as he believes it did ahead of the invasion of Ukraine.

"And as we've seen in, you know, in where Putin's hubris has now gotten Russia, and the horrors that he's ... brought to the people of Ukraine," he said. "In that kind of a system, a very closed decision-making system when nobody challenges, you know, the authority of their insights of an authoritarian leader, you can make some huge blunders as well."