MOSCOW (Reuters) - U.S. CIA Director William Burns said on Saturday that disaffection in Russia with the war in Ukraine was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to recruit spies - and that his agency was not letting it go to waste.

"Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression," Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, said in a lecture to Britain's Ditchley Foundation in Oxfordshire, England.

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

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)