There was a real danger that Russia would use tactical nuclear weapons two years ago after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine faltered, CIA Director William Burns said Saturday.
Burns, speaking in London alongside his British counterpart, Richard Moore, head of the MI6 foreign intelligence service, also said Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region was a “significant tactical achievement” that undermined Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda about how the war was unfolding.
Ukrainian troops crossed into Russia’s Kursk region last month with armored vehicles and aerial support, seizing land and taking prisoners of war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told NBC News this week that Kyiv plans to hold the territories it has seized indefinitely.
Burns said the U.S. takes seriously the possibility of Russia resorting to nuclear weapons.
“None of us should take lightly the risks of escalation,” Burns said at a Financial Times event. “There was a moment in the fall of 2022 when I think there was a genuine risk of … the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons.”
But he added: “I have never thought, however, and this is the view of my agency, that we should be unnecessarily intimidated by that. Putin’s a bully.”
Moore agreed, saying the West would keep up its support of Ukraine.
“As Bill said, nobody in the West is going to be intimidated by such talk or any other behavior by the Russian state, because we all recognize we’ve got to stay in this and we have to try and help the Ukrainians to restore their independence and sovereignty,” he said.
Making their first public appearance together, they both said Ukraine’s attack inside Russian territory had undercut the Kremlin’s official narrative that Moscow was headed to an inevitable victory as part of a war of attrition.
The move into Kursk was “typically audacious and bold on the part of the Ukrainians, to try and change the game,” Moore said, but he added that the outcome remained unclear.
“It’s too early to say how long the Ukrainians will be able to hang on in there,” he said.
Both men expressed concern about growing military ties among China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Moore said the Ukraine conflict had illustrated increasing “pragmatic cooperation” among those countries, with Russia using Iranian-made drones, Chinese components for military hardware and North Korean artillery ammunition.
Asked about his extensive efforts to help negotiate a cease-fire and hostage release agreement between Israel and Hamas, Burns said new proposals were due to be presented within several days but declined to predict whether a breakthrough was imminent.
“I cannot sit here today with all of you and say that we’re going to succeed in that,” he said.
Despite the obstacles to clinching a deal, Burns and Moore both said a cease-fire accord was the best chance to lower tensions and prevent a wider regional war that could have catastrophic consequences.
“There’s this genuine concern, certainly amongst the people that we deal with in the Israeli intelligence and security services, about the potential for a much wider regional conflict,” Burns said. “And I think that’s why a cease-fire in Gaza has become so important.”
Moore said that although a potential direct conflict between Iran and Israel was averted in recent weeks, an agreement to halt the fighting between Israel and Hamas is crucial.
“We have navigated, touch wood again, past another crisis point between Israel and Iran. But as long as … we don’t get to a cease-fire, that risk is there. And for all the horror of Gaza, a wider conflagration in the Middle East would be vastly worse,” Moore said.
Asked about media reports that Iran is providing Russia with short-range ballistic missiles, Burns declined to confirm whether such weapons transfers had taken place. He said such a move “would be a dramatic escalation” of the defense partnership between Iran and Russia.
In a joint op-ed published on Saturday in The Financial Times, Burns and Moore said the collaboration between their two spy services was at the heart of the close relationship between the U.K. and the U.S.
Moore and Burns wrote that their two countries were working together to thwart what they called Russia’s “reckless” attempts to carry out sabotage across Europe as it tries to counter Western support for Ukraine.
Disrupting sabotage plots required “good, old-fashioned security and intelligence work” and identifying the Russian intelligence officers and “the criminal elements that they are using,” Moore said Saturday.
“The fact that they are using their criminal elements shows you that they’re becoming a bit desperate. They can’t use their own people,” he said.
“Criminals do stuff for cash. You know, they’re not reliable. They’re not particularly professional, and therefore, usually, we’re able to roll them up pretty effectively,” he added.
Russia has denied accusations from U.S., British and other governments that it has pursued a campaign of attempted sabotage in Europe. Western intelligence officials say Russia’s ability to carry out espionage has been hampered by the expulsions of hundreds of Russian intelligence agents from Russian embassies in European capitals two years ago.
