Ratcliffe Secretly Visits Moscow, Proposes Trump Putin Talks

John Ratcliffe, director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), traveled to Moscow on Tuesday, August 25, and the trip went publicly unannounced for days. It is the first known visit by the head of a U.S. intelligence agency to the Russian capital since late 2021. According to Axios, reporting on August 29, Ratcliffe used the talks to propose a three-way summit between presidents Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, the first serious attempt to revive negotiations over ending the war in Ukraine since the process stalled in mid-February. For Serbia, an EU candidate country whose foreign policy balances between Brussels and Moscow, any movement on this front has a direct bearing on the sanctions regime against Russia and on the pace of enlargement that concerns the whole region.

Flight over Latvia, no meeting with Putin

Ratcliffe flew into the Russian capital on an unmarked military C-17 transport plane out of Latvia. He met with Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, and Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), but according to available information did not speak with Vladimir Putin in person. Trump sent Ratcliffe personally, and some senior White House officials were not briefed on the trip in advance, which says enough about how tightly the mission was held.

Per the U.S. intelligence assessment, Putin currently views the United States as weakened by its involvement in the war with Iran and by depleted military stockpiles. That, according to foreign media reports, is one reason Washington chose to send the director of its intelligence agency to Moscow rather than a diplomat. Ratcliffe told his Russian counterparts that a fresh escalation in Ukraine would push Trump closer to Zelensky, and that Washington still stands behind its commitment under Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, meaning an attack on any NATO member would trigger a collective response.

Why a trilateral summit now?

Part of the purpose of the visit was to test whether the heads of Russia’s intelligence services could persuade Putin to return to negotiations under American mediation. On Friday, the Americans briefed Zelensky on the Moscow talks and on the proposal for a three-way summit, and the Ukrainian president confirmed this on August 28.

“We received information from the American side about the meetings in Moscow that took place these past days,” Zelensky said in his evening address. He added that Kyiv appreciates “the coordination of steps and the fact that America is presenting a fairly realistic vision” of a resolution.

Signals from the Kremlin about the significance of the meeting have been mixed. Naryshkin told Russian media that “a meeting took place” and that “there is nothing unusual about it,” framing the talks as routine communication between intelligence channels. Asked by reporters whether he feared a Russian attack on a NATO member state, Trump replied simply that Putin “will not attack NATO territory.”

Kyiv doubts Putin is ready to negotiate

Putin has previously rejected the idea of a three-way summit, while Zelensky openly supports it. Ukrainian officials, despite the diplomatic movement in Moscow, say they have intelligence indicating that Putin is preparing a major escalation and has ordered the military to draw up scenarios for an offensive in northern Ukraine. The negotiating process, as a reminder, stalled in mid-February, and Kyiv has signaled it is willing to resume contacts under U.S. mediation as early as September.

Ratcliffe’s trip is the first of its kind since former director William Burns tried, in late 2021, to talk the Kremlin out of invading Ukraine, an effort that failed at the time. Whether this year’s attempt produces real movement, or ends up as just another diplomatic channel with no visible outcome, depends on whether Moscow accepts a format it has rejected until now.