(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s central intelligence chief traveled to Moscow this week with a warning to Russia not to stage an attack in NATO territory, among other issues, according to two people familiar with the matter.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe also used the trip, which wasn’t announced publicly, to encourage Russia to cut off economic and military support for Iran as the administration works to choke off Tehran financially.
American and European officials have grown increasingly concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin could test NATO with a limited incursion, potentially on one of Moscow’s neighbors, as his war in Ukraine grinds ahead without resolution.
Ratcliffe’s trip this week was the first known visit by a senior Trump administration official to Moscow in months. The last visit by a CIA director to the Russian capital came under the Biden administration in 2021, when William Burns warned Putin against a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia invaded three months later.
CNN has reached out to the CIA. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Ratcliffe’s warning in Russia.
Asked this week about fears Russia could stage an attack on NATO, Trump denied that was the intent of Ratcliffe’s trip.
“He’s there, you know, very sort of semi-routine,” Trump told Glenn Beck in a radio interview on Wednesday. “I hate to disappoint people. We would like to see the war with Ukraine end.”
Recent US and western intelligence assessments have indicated Putin could try to test NATO’s resolve by launching a limited attack on an allied country within the next few years, CNN has previously reported.
The intelligence assessments outline several possible scenarios for Russian escalation, ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale incursion intended to challenge NATO’s unity and commitment to Article 5 — which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all — without necessarily crossing the threshold for an allied response, the sources said.
How and when Putin might do so remains an open question. But sources have said he is most likely to escalate in some way by targeting the Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — or Poland.
There have been numerous instances over the last few years of Russia encroaching on NATO territory. In May, a drone carrying explosives hit an apartment building in Romania as Russian forces attacked a nearby Ukrainian port, injuring two people. And last September, NATO fighter jets shot down multiple Russian drones that had violated Polish airspace during an attack on Ukraine.
And earlier this month, the US assessed that an explosive-laden drone discovered at an airport in Germany belonged to a Russian intelligence service.
Trump has maintained a contentious relationship with NATO, and has lashed out at the alliance’s members for not being more supportive of his war against Iran. He has never entirely ruled out attempting to withdraw the US from the bloc.
Still, a NATO summit in Turkey last month ended amicably. And he maintains friendly ties with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
Asked whether Ratcliffe was visiting Moscow to raise concerns about Russian designs on NATO territory or to ask for Russia’s help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, Trump told Beck, “John Ratcliffe is a fantastic guy. He’s the head of the CIA, and he is not in there for any of the things that you said.”
Ratcliffe flew to Moscow aboard a C-17 Globemaster III, a military transport aircraft. According to flight tracking website Flightradar24, the flight initially took off from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and transited through Riga, the Latvian capital.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the CIA director did not meet with Putin during the trip.
He said Ratcliffe’s contact with Russia was “more or less at the level of the special services.”
Peskov added that while this was “positive,” it was premature to speculate “whether this will have an effect overall on the process of pulling our bilateral relations out of the deepest crisis they are currently in.”
The US had asked Ukraine to halt drone and missile strikes in Moscow and other cities in the north of Russia ahead of Ratcliffe’s trip, a person familiar with the matter said. The Ukrainians were told a senior US official would be traveling in Russia.
The-CNN-Wire
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