TOP HEADLINES

• Russia launched an overnight drone attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region after a 12-day break, with air defense systems destroying all the weapons on their approach, Ukrainian military officials said.

• U.S. CIA Director William Burns said that following the armed mutiny in Russia, disaffection in the country was offering a once-in-a-generation opportunity to recruit spies - and that his agency was not letting it go to waste. READ MORE BELOW

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants his country to receive an "invitation" to join NATO after the conflict at a key meeting this month, saying he needed "a very clear and understandable signal at the Vilnius summit."

• The Ukrainian leader also accused "some" Western partners of being slow over plans to supply and train Kyiv pilots to fly fighter jets. "Do they have an understanding of when Ukraine can get the F-16?" Zelenskyy said. "I believe some partners are dragging their feet. Why are they doing it? I don't know."

• He went on to warn that a "serious threat" remained at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, claiming that Russia was "technically ready" to provoke a localized explosion at the facility.

• Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez pledged the EU's "unequivocal" support for Ukraine during a visit to Kyiv on the first day of Spain assuming presidency of the bloc.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin's media holding group is to shut down, the director of one of its outlets said, highlighting the mercenary chief's worsening fortunes a week after the abortion of a brief mutiny staged by his Wagner Group fighters.

• U.S. President Joe Biden is set to host Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson next week to talk about Stockholm's admission to NATO and the Ukraine conflict. The White House said the leaders would "reaffirm their view that Sweden should join NATO as soon as possible."

• Forty diplomats and Russian embassy staff in Bucharest are set to leave Romania following a request from the government, as ties continue to worsen between the two countries.

IN DETAIL

CIA director says time is ripe to recruit Russian spies

CIA Director William Burns said the armed mutiny by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin had shown the corrosive effect of the Ukraine conflict in Russia, adding that the time was ripe for the U.S. to recruit Russian spies. 

Putin this week thanked the army and security forces for averting what he said could have turned into a civil war, and has compared the mutiny to the chaos that plunged Russia into two revolutions in 1917.

"It is striking that Prigozhin preceded his actions with a scathing indictment of the Kremlin's mendacious rationale for the invasion of Ukraine and of the Russian military leadership's conduct of the war," Burns said in a lecture to Britain's Ditchley Foundation in Oxfordshire, England.

"The impact of those words and those actions will play out for some time - a vivid reminder of the corrosive effect of Putin's war on his own society and his own regime."

Burns, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008 and was appointed CIA director in 2021, described Prigozhin's mutiny as an "armed challenge to the Russian state."

He added that the mutiny was an "internal Russian affair in which the United States has had and will have no part."

Russia's top diplomat Sergei Lavrov on Friday said the country would emerge stronger after the failed mutiny so the West need not worry about stability in the world's biggest nuclear power.

But Burns said that the conflict had already been a strategic failure for Russia by highlighting its military weakness and damaging the Russian economy, while the NATO military alliance was growing bigger and stronger.

Burns added that disaffection in Russia with the conflict was creating a rare opportunity to recruit spies - and the CIA was not letting it pass.

"Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practised repression," Burns said.

"That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at the CIA - at our core a human intelligence service. We're not letting it go to waste."

The Kremlin said in May that its agencies were tracking Western spy activity after the CIA published a video encouraging Russians to make contact via a secure internet channel.

The short video in Russian was accompanied by a text saying the agency wanted to hear from military officers, intelligence specialists, diplomats, scientists and people with information about Russia's economy and its leadership.

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