An unannounced and unexplained one-day visit to Moscow by CIA director John Ratcliffe has raised concerns over whether Russia is gearing up to test Nato.
Reports that Vladimir Putin cancelled participation in a major event on the same day, and shortly afterwards issued three secret decrees, have added to the speculation.
Neither Russia or the US have made any official comment. However, various theories have been put forward for why Ratcliffe felt he needed not only to have a private conversation with Russia that was both sensitive and important enough for a rare face-to-face meeting, but also to keep it off any official agenda.
One suggestion is that he might have delivered a warning over Russia’s continued escalation of hostile acts against Nato countries, including sabotage, electronic warfare and drone attacks. The last visit of this kind came in November 2021, when then CIA director Bill Burns travelled to Moscow to try to persuade Putin not to proceed with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But it is hard to be optimistic on this front. Burns failed in part because the US administration of the time, under Joe Biden, was unwilling to confront Russia for fear of nuclear escalation. The current administration, for different reasons, is even less willing. The likelihood of the US doing anything to confront Russia is even more remote now than it was then.
The talks may have been focused on Ukraine, including a possible halt to strikes on the energy infrastructure of both countries – another explanation that could perhaps lead to a positive outcome.
At the pessimistic end of the scale, there is he possibility that this could have been a private conversation clarifying the rules of the new relationship between the United States and Russia under Trump, over the heads of the European states that will be affected by it. As I detail in my forthcoming book, American Overthrow, that relationship is highly dangerous for allies and partners of the US, given the sympathy the Trump administration has shown for Moscow’s aspirations in Ukraine and beyond.
Other suggested explanations include talks over prisoner exchanges. The CIA and Ratcliffe personally have been directly involved in negotiating the release of American citizens held in Russia. But that hasn’t previously required his personal attendance in Moscow, and if his aircraft brought back any additional passengers, we have not yet been told about it.
Iran is another possible topic of the conversation: whether trying to persuade Russia to join the US campaign to isolate Tehran economically, or perhaps to ask it to stop providing information to Iran to assist in the targeting of US assets and personnel in the Gulf region. In either of those cases, it’s hard to see how the US might hope to cajole Putin into doing something against Russia’s interests.
While we don’t yet know what the visit was about, there is plenty to be learned from the way it was conducted.
A C-17 Globemaster, believed to be carrying CIA director John Ratcliffe, lands near Riga, Latvia, on Tuesday (Photo: @Alfredspodins via X/via Reuters)The shifting power balance between the US, Ukraine and Russia was highlighted by an American request to Ukraine to suspend strikes on Moscow for the duration of the visit. Ukraine agreed.
On the one hand, that’s a demonstration that the US has no confidence in Russia’s air defences. It also shows how, in effect, the visit proceeded with Ukraine’s permission. But it’s also the opposite of what happened just a few days previously, when US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner cancelled a planned visit to Kyiv because of Russia’s continuing drone and missile strikes.
That reveals that, in contrast with the request to Ukraine, the US felt unable to ask Russia to suspend its campaign for long enough for the pair to visit – or alternatively, the US did ask, and was rebuffed by Russian officials who felt no need to offer Washington any favours.
The apparent attempts to keep the visit confidential only add to suspicion around its purpose. Rather than an official announcement, it was flight movements and an unexpected American motorcade being filmed in Moscow that alerted the world – while Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov continued to deny that anything was happening or that any meetings with American officials had been planned.
It seems unlikely that either the US or Russia genuinely believed that the visit could be kept secret. But that leaves open the question of what all the secrecy was for. It’s not felt to be necessary, for instance, around the forthcoming long-planned visit of FBI director Kash Patel to Russia in October.
It’s hard not to see the official silence as an indication that of all the possible reasons for Ratcliffe’s visit, the real one is toward the pessimistic end of the scale: that the US is discussing something with its Russian partners that would be bad news if Europe found out about it. Unless and until a plausible alternative explanation emerges, European countries have every reason to be alarmed.
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