Newsweek, August 27, 2026
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow this week quickly prompted speculation over why the spy chief would make the long, but brief, journey to the Russian capital—including whether he hoped to head off a possible Russian attack on NATO.
President Donald Trump, while not detailing the agenda nor who was present from the Russian side, described the meeting as “semi-routine.”
The Kremlin said Ratcliffe hadn’t met with Russian President Vladimir Putin but had made the unannounced trip to keep up “contacts between security services.”
Ratcliffe warned top Russian officials not to up the long-running hybrid warfare campaign against NATO allies, particularly against the three Baltic states deeply worried about how Moscow may respond to the standstill in the war against Ukraine, Politico reported, citing two anonymous people familiar with the matter.
For many, Ratcliffe’s trip revived memories of former CIA head William Burns’ rare personal visit to Moscow in November 2021, when Burns sat down with senior Kremlin names and the head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, Sergei Naryshki.
Burns, a former U.S. envoy to Moscow, later said he had made the journey to warn the Kremlin against launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine as its troops amassed on the border with its neighbor. Russia invaded little over three months later.
“I came away from those conversations even more troubled than when I arrived,” Burns said in July 2022.
Ratcliffe’s visit comes just weeks after U.S. officials said Washington now assesses Russia could launch a “limited” attack on NATO’s eastern European edge as soon as this fall.
This could involve sending a small number of Russian troops over into the Baltic states or Poland or the upping of Moscow’s hybrid warfare operations, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
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