Ukraine’s Kursk offensive has dented Vladimir Putin’s war narrative and triggered “questions” among the Russian elite about the point of the war, two of the world’s leading spy chiefs have said.
CIA director Bill Burns said Kursk was “a significant tactical achievement” that had boosted Ukrainian morale and exposed Russia’s weaknesses. It has “raised questions . . . across the Russian elite about where is this all headed”, he said.
He was speaking at the Financial Times’ Weekend festival in London on Saturday alongside MI6 chief Richard Moore.
Moore said the Kursk offensive was “a typically audacious and bold move by the Ukrainians . . . to try and change the game” — although he cautioned it was “too early” to say how long Kyiv’s forces would be able to control the Russian territory they had seized.
It is the first time the two heads have appeared together at a public event in the history of their agencies’ 77-year intelligence sharing partnership. It also represents the latest move by the US and British spy agencies to come out of the shadows to warn the countries they serve about the mounting dangers that the world faces.
The spy chiefs spoke about what they called an unprecedented range of threats to the international world order, from Putin’s war in Ukraine and Russia’s campaign of sabotage operations across Europe to the rise of China and rapid technological change.
One area of particular focus is the conflict in the Middle East.
Asked whether there was going to be a deal to release Israeli hostages held in Gaza, Burns, who has been deeply involved the negotiations, said: “This goes to a question of whether or not leaders on both sides are prepared to recognise that enough is enough, and that the time has come for them to make some hard choices and some difficult compromises.”
Burns said that, while he could not say the talks were going to be a success, “I also cannot tell you how close we are right now”. A potential deal between Israel and Hamas was “90 per cent” there and “the last 10 per cent” was always the hardest part.
A more detailed proposal would come in “the next several days . . . [and] my hope is that they [the Israeli and Hamas leaders] will recognise what is at stake here”.
Burns also stressed that a two-state solution was central to securing a lasting peace, as it was “crucial to offer some sense of hope for the day after, not just for Gaza, but for all Palestinians and Israelis”.
“It is a very elusive goal . . . but the only thing I would say is: show me what’s a better alternative,” he said.
Burns, 68, is a career diplomat now working as a spy, and Moore, 61, is a career intelligence officer who has previously worked as a diplomat. Both are Oxford university graduates who have led parallel professional lives working on Russian, Middle Eastern and Asian affairs.
On Russia, both men said there was no sign that Putin’s grip on power had lessened. But it would be wrong to “confuse a tight grip on power with a stable grip”, Moore said, especially as the Kursk incursion had “brought the war home to ordinary Russians”.
Both also said it would be wrong to take Putin’s threats of nuclear escalation lightly but that the west should not be unnecessarily intimidated. “Putin is a bully and is going to continue sabre-rattling from time to time,” Burns said.
Asked whether Iran had shipped short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, Burns said that doing so would “mark a dramatic escalation”.
Moore said that if Russia did use Iranian missiles in Ukraine, alongside the drones that Tehran had already supplied, it would be “very obvious”.
Recent Russian sabotage operations across Europe were “reckless”, Moore said, describing Russian intelligence as “having gone a bit feral”. But “in the UK that is not new”, he added, referring to the attempted assassination of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018.
Asked if Russian intelligence might be conducting similar sabotage operations against the US by abetting illegal migration across the Mexico border, Burns said: “It’s something we are very sharply focused on. Part of that is a function of so many Russian agents [being] kicked out of Europe. So they are looking for somewhere to go instead.”
Despite the threat posed by Russia and the risk of conflagration in the Middle East, both Burns and Moore stressed that their biggest challenge was China’s rise.
Burns said the funds that the CIA devoted to China had tripled over the past three years to 20 per cent of the agency’s budget, and that he had travelled twice to China over the past year for talks to “avoid unnecessary misunderstandings”.
Moore described regular contact with his Chinese counterparts as “essential”.
Burns and Moore said one aim of their joint appearance was to underscore the strength of the UK-US relationship at a time of unprecedented global risks.
“The international world order . . . is under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the cold war,” both spy chiefs wrote in an article published on Saturday in the FT. Combating that risk “is at the very foundation of our special relationship . . . [which] can be relied upon into the next century,” they said.
The closest comparable occasion to their rare joint performance on Saturday was a news conference given by Ken McCallum, the head of British domestic intelligence MI5, and his US counterpart, Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI, in London in July 2022.
