CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a quiet trip to Moscow on August 25 with a warning for the Kremlin: do not stage an attack on NATO territory. The visit was never announced ahead of time. Two people familiar with the matter told CNN that the warning was among the issues he raised.
Ratcliffe flew in aboard a C-17 Globemaster III military transport. The jet took off from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and stopped in Riga, the Latvian capital, before continuing on to Russia. Flight trackers spotted the U.S. Air Force plane landing at a Moscow airport on Tuesday, August 25, and video of a diplomatic motorcade rolling through the city showed up on social media.
He did not meet Vladimir Putin. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the contact had taken place at the level of the intelligence services, meaning Ratcliffe sat down with Russia’s intelligence people rather than the president. The Wall Street Journal was first to report the purpose of the visit.
Iran came up too
Ratcliffe also pressed Russia to cut off economic and military support for Iran, part of a wider push to squeeze Tehran’s finances. According to CBS News, he warned of more sanctions if the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping route, does not reopen to traffic. The Trump administration has been threatening Iran’s trading partners with secondary sanctions after six months of war between the U.S., Israel and Iran. Russia has long kept close economic and military ties with Tehran, including years of joint work on drone manufacturing.
Why U.S. intelligence got nervous
The trip followed a run of warnings that Russia, backed into a corner in Ukraine, might lash out somewhere else. U.S. officials assessed that Moscow was in an increasingly weak spot in the war, which could push it to take military action against NATO. The idea would be to raise the stakes of backing Ukraine and force a settlement that favors Russia.
There was no specific intelligence that an attack was coming, and officials put the window at the next few years, rating the chance of a land incursion extremely low, at least initially. What worried analysts was a pattern. For weeks, warnings pointed to possible sabotage, cyberattacks, drone incursions, or even a small land grab in Europe. At least one recent report assessed that Putin likely believes the U.S. will not risk getting pulled into another war, which could give him the confidence to move.
Russia is bogged down on the front lines and bleeding money. Ukrainian strikes have hit the oil refineries that fund the invasion, along with warehouses tied to Wildberries, the country’s largest online retailer, per The Daily Beast. Western sanctions have piled on top of that. A cornered Putin, the thinking goes, is an unpredictable one.
It has happened before, and it went badly
The last time a CIA director showed up in Moscow like this was November 2021. Bill Burns, who ran the agency under President Biden, went to warn Putin against invading Ukraine. Russia denied it was planning anything. Less than four months later, in February 2022, Russian tanks rolled across the border.
That history is exactly why this trip set off alarms. Katia Glod, deputy head of foreign policy at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre, told CNBC it was “quite an unusual visit.” Heather Conley of the American Enterprise Institute told the Wall Street Journal it has always been a Russian goal to “challenge the credibility of NATO and to separate the United States from its allies.”
Trump says there is nothing to it
The president is waving the whole story off. Trump told Axios that Ratcliffe delivered no warning at all, saying, “I am not concerned…at all. There is no problem.” He called the trip “standard business” and said his CIA chief meets his Russian counterpart once every six months or once every year.
On Glenn Beck’s radio show, Trump described the meeting as “semi-routine” and said “something may come out of” it, pointing to his effort to end the war in Ukraine. “I hate to disappoint people,” he added. In the Oval Office, he put it plainly: “He’s not going to be attacking a NATO territory.”
The Baltics are the likeliest target
If Putin does test NATO, sources said the most likely spots are Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the three Baltic states. A limited move there, a cyberattack or a small incursion, would force NATO to decide whether to invoke Article 5, the treaty clause that says an attack on one member is an attack on all. NATO has invoked it once, after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
Baltic officials spent the days after the trip trying to calm nerves. Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said his country’s threat assessment “has not changed,” but told reporters Russia “must have no room to miscalculate.” Latvia’s foreign minister, Baiba Braze, said Russia’s aggression and its rising hybrid attacks “leave no room for complacency.”
The bigger concern, according to Euronews, is timing. A European military source said intelligence agencies have picked up signals for months that Moscow could try to exploit the moment, with Washington distracted by Iran and pushing Europe to handle more of its own defense. A limited operation would not need the huge buildup that telegraphed the 2022 invasion. If the goal is to test NATO rather than grab land, staying vague is the point. The same source cautioned that none of this is evidence Russia has decided to act.
What Russia and Ukraine are saying
Sergey Naryshkin, head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, confirmed he met Ratcliffe. “It took place; there was nothing out of the ordinary,” he told the Russian state agency TASS, adding that such meetings, in person or online, are “part of our work.” Peskov later brushed off the media reports about the trip’s purpose entirely.Ukraine was kept in the loop. A senior Ukrainian official said Kyiv was told a U.S. delegation would travel to Moscow and was asked to hold off on strikes for the length of the visit. Washington specifically asked Ukraine to pause drone and missile attacks on Moscow, St. Petersburg and northern Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the United States had shared information about the meetings in Moscow.
Drones keep crossing NATO’s borders
The warning did not come out of nowhere. Russian drones have entered NATO airspace over and over this year, including over Romania and Poland, where several were shot down. In late May 2026, a drone carrying explosives hit an apartment building in Romania while Russian forces struck a nearby Ukrainian port, injuring two people. On August 5, a drone carrying an explosive charge was found at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany. A U.S. intelligence source said it bore the hallmarks of Russian military intelligence; the charge did not detonate, and Germany has not attributed it. On the night of August 26, five Russian drones crossed into Moldovan airspace.
There is also a supply problem. The U.S. military is facing what a U.S. defense official in Europe and a NATO official called a “beyond critical” shortage of advanced missile interceptors on the continent, the Associated Press reported, driven largely by the war with Iran. The biggest gap is in Patriot interceptors, the ones built to knock down Russia’s fast ballistic missiles. Poland took delivery on August 25 of 28 more South Korean K2 Black Panther tanks, completing the first shipment under a second contract, which it plans to station near Russia’s Kaliningrad region. Deputy Defense Minister Cezary Tomczyk said Warsaw is preparing for the possibility of a full-scale conflict.
For now, the assessments hold two things at once. There is no imminent military threat to NATO, one European official said, and there is enough behind the warning that Washington felt the need to fly its spy chief into Moscow to deliver it in person. The last time it did that, the tanks came less than four months later.
