Wagner boss Prigozhin was just winging it with his armed revolt and making things up as he went along, CIA director says

• Yevgeny Prigozhin shocked the world when he called on his Wagner Group fighters to invade Russia. 
• CIA Director Bill Burns said this week that Prigozhin was likely improvising during the armed rebellion.
• Prigozhin was "making some of this up as he went along," Burns told the Aspen Security Forum.

Just as quickly as the Wagner Group's armed rebellion began, it was over, leaving a trail of confusion in its wake.

The speed at which the mercenaries invaded Russia and how close they came to Moscow last month shocked the world. The organization staged what, at the time, seemed to be an effective mutiny, but Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner's leader and the mastermind behind the chaos, was improvising and making it up as he went, the top US spy chief said this week. 

President Joe Biden "put it succinctly when he said that we knew things ahead of time, and I'm not going to go into any more detail than that, but Prigozhin I think was making some of this up as he went along," CIA Director William Burns told the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday. 

Burns said Prigozhin's main targets were "clearly" Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, who together oversee Moscow's war in Ukraine, and added that "a lot of this had been hiding in plain sight, too, because he had been scathing in his public criticisms of both of them. So it didn't come as any real surprise when he decided to take action."

Prigozhin's public bashing of Russia's military leadership was a months-long affair, one in which the warlord often criticized Moscow's military leaders for their incompetence and the lack of critical supplies and ammunition for Wagner mercenaries fighting alongside the regular army in Ukraine. The feud ultimately reached a boiling point on June 23 when Prigozhin decided he'd had enough and called on his fighters to invade Russia itself. 

Within hours, the Wagner Group had captured the southern city of Rostov-on-Don without meeting any resistance. The mercenaries then continued north toward Moscow, shooting down several Russian aircraft and killing their aircrews on the way. But before Wagner reached the capital, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko brokered last-minute negotiations between Prigozhin and the Kremlin to stop Wagner from storming the city. 

Though finished, the short-lived mutiny has continued to raise questions about how the Wagner Group was able to seamlessly invade the country it was tasked with fighting for and even hold its own during the brief moments of combat with the Russian military.

He now appears to be at a military camp in Belarus — alongside Wagner fighters who recently began training Belarusian soldiers, and he indicated this week that he'll soon venture to Africa, where his mercenaries have a footprint in several countries across the continent. 

While the Wagner Group undergoes changes in its responsibilities, Russia — and President Vladimir Putin in particular — continue to pick up the pieces of Prigozhin's short-lived mutiny. US officials have said that the insurrection has revealed serious cracks in Putin's authority, with war experts observing internal power plays and high-level purges in the aftermath. 

"I think you're seeing signs of weakness in that system," Burns said on Thursday. "I think those weaknesses have been exposed by Prigozhin's mutiny, but I think even more deeply than that, they've been exposed by Putin's misjudgment since he launched this invasion as well."

He added that there's a relationship between the current battlefield conditions in Ukraine and what's happening domestically in Russia.

"If and when" the Ukrainian military continues to make gains, Burns said, it will cause Russians — including the Kremlin elite — to actually listen to Prigozhin's critiques of Putin's war justifications. 

Ukraine is now several weeks into its counteroffensive and has seen limited territorial gains in the occupied eastern and southern regions. Kyiv's troops have been forced to move slowly, however, because of Russia's formidable defensive lines and fortifications, like trenches, barbed wire, anti-armor obstacles, and minefields. Clearing these is a painstaking and deadly process. 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told reporters at a press briefing this week that Ukraine is still yet to commit a significant amount of combat power — like NATO-provided tanks and heavy armor — to the fight, as Kyiv preserves its firepower while steadily working through the sprawling Russian minefields. 

"This is going to be long, it's going to be hard, it's going to be bloody," Milley said. "And at the end of the day, we'll see where the Ukrainians end up, vis-a-vis the Russians."