CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow on 25 August was linked to “contacts between the intelligence services”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with The Washington Post. He did not provide any further details.
Peskov told the Russian state news agency TASS that no meeting between the CIA Director and Russian President Vladimir Putin had been planned.
As noted by the WP, on 25 August Peskov claimed that the Kremlin had no information regarding US military aircraft that had arrived at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced visit to Moscow on 25 August, US officials confirmed to Radio Free Europe. This unusual visit took place at a time when Washington’s efforts to end Russia’s war against Ukraine had reached an impasse, and tensions surrounding Moscow’s relations with Iran had intensified.
The reason for John Ratcliffe’s visit – his first publicly known trip to Russia since he took charge of the CIA under President Donald Trump – remains unknown. US officials aware of his trip confirmed that he was in Moscow, but declined to disclose the content of his meetings or say who he was due to meet.
Neither the CIA nor the White House has publicly commented on the visit.
The first indication of the trip came from flight-tracking services, which recorded an American military transport aircraft travelling from the United States via Latvia to Moscow. A Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, believed to have taken off from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport early on Tuesday morning and subsequently left Russia, according to flight tracking data.
Axios journalist Barak Ravid wrote that the US authorities had asked Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian territory for the duration of Ratcliffe’s visit.
The Wall Street Journal cited several possible reasons for Ratcliffe’s visit: a likely mobilisation in Russia, an intensification of Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory, a war with Iran, or a possible provocation by Moscow against NATO member states.
Alexander Yunashov, a journalist from the Kremlin press corps, suggested that it was precisely because of Ratcliffe’s visit that the Russian president’s schedule had been changed – according to him, a “very large-scale event” had been scheduled for Tuesday, which was rescheduled a few days before the CIA director’s arrival.
The CIA director’s previous visit to Moscow took place in November 2021, a few months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – at that time, William Burns held the post.