John Ratcliffe, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), traveled to Moscow on Tuesday for an unannounced visit to meet with Russian officials, as confirmed to CNN by a member of the U.S. team aware of the trip.
The official refused to disclose the content of the meetings or the topics discussed, and the CIA declined to make any comments about the trip.
The movement was detected thanks to the flight tracking site Flightradar24, which recorded the landing of a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III —an American military transport aircraft— at Moscow's Vnúkovo International Airport in the early morning hours.
The flight is believed to have departed from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
CBS News was the first outlet to report on Ratcliffe's presence in Russian territory, followed by Axios, Reuters, and CNN. No source identified whom the CIA chief met with or confirmed whether there was any meeting at the Kremlin.
The Kremlin's spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, responded that he had no information regarding the arrival of the plane or the visit, and that there were no plans for meetings with U.S. representatives that week.
This is Ratcliffe's first known trip to Russia since taking office under the presidency of Donald Trump.
According to Reuters, this would also mark the first known visit of a CIA director to Moscow since William Burns met with Vladimir Putin in November 2021, amid escalating tensions leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The trip comes at a time of stalemate in the negotiations to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, driven by the Trump administration.
In recent weeks, there have been contradictory signals from Moscow: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated on August 14 that Russia would "not reject" talks with U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner if they visited the country, and a senior Russian diplomat indicated on August 21 that Moscow was "open to hearing new proposals," although only if they reflected the "realities on the ground."
For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on August 11 that Ukraine had presented U.S. negotiators with concrete proposals to end the war with Moscow.
Ratcliffe's visit also comes a day after the Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, announced the so-called "Economic Marginalization Operation," a new sanctions strategy aimed at economically isolating Iran by applying pressure on countries and entities that continue to conduct business with Tehran.
Russia is a strategic trading partner of Iran, adding a layer of geopolitical complexity to the meeting in Moscow.
Ratcliffe accumulates a profile of active intelligence diplomacy: in May of this year, he visited Havana in what was the first known visit of a CIA director to Cuba, where he met with officials from the Ministry of Interior (MININT) and delivered a message from Trump conditioning any dialogue on "fundamental changes" by the Cuban regime.
That trip to Havana was also detected through the tracking of the U.S. Air Force official plane, in a pattern that is now repeating with the movement to Moscow.
The last time a CIA director visited the Russian capital, in November 2021, Burns met with high-ranking officials from the Kremlin and spoke by phone with Putin to warn about the consequences of a possible invasion of Ukraine. Three months later, Russia launched its large-scale offensive.
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