WHAT HAPPENED TO VLAD: CIA Director Bill Burns turned up last week for The Cipher Brief Threat Conference in Sea Island, GA. As you may know, Sea Island was the site of the 2004 G8 summit. Yep, G8 – (as opposed to G7 today) back when Russia and Putin were still somewhat friendly with the West and invited to the get togethers. Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly, who interviewed Burns onstage during the conference, showed a photo from the 2004 summit of all of the G8 members at the time walking along the beach and asked the director, “What happened to Vladimir Putin?” Burns, (who as it turns out, has a somewhat wicked sense of humor) responded “Well, he’s gotten a little puffier since that picture,” and went on to say, “ I think – while I’m not a fatalist – about the way in which US-Russian relations have worsened, certainly since that photo.” It turns out the director had a few other good one-liners and secrets to share. You can see the full interview on The Cipher Brief’s YouTube channel (and if you subscribe while you’re there, you’ll get alerts for the great new content TCB produces).
BELATED BIRTHDAY: We forgot to send a card to Vladimir Putin on the occasion of his 72nd birthday on Monday. But apparently, we were not alone. Ukrainian observer Anton Gerashchenko noted on X that he could find only 12 world leaders who wished Vlad many happy returns this year. They included Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Bellarus’ Alexandr Lukashenko, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Quite a crowd of admirers. Putin purportedly used to get lots more acknowledgement commemorating his annual trips around the sun – but his “special military activity” in Ukraine seems to have damped the enthusiasm of many fellow world leaders.
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