Month: September 2026

WASHINGTON — A week after CIA Director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced trip to Moscow, questions remain over what prompted the unusual mission and what Washington believes Russia may be preparing to do.

Ratcliffe reportedly warned Russian officials against attacking or testing NATO, with particular concern about the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. He also reportedly discussed Russia’s support for Iran. US President Donald Trump described the visit as “semi-routine,” saying Washington wanted to see the war in Ukraine end, and that “something may come” from it.

The CIA has not publicly disclosed the full agenda. The Kremlin said Ratcliffe did not meet with President Vladimir Putin, describing the trip as part of continuing contacts between the two countries’ security services.

US officials have briefed NATO allies about concerns over Russia’s potential behavior, while Ukraine has said it was briefed before and after Ratcliffe’s trip.

Ratcliffe’s visit was the first publicly known trip to Moscow by a serving CIA director since William Burns traveled there in November 2021, months before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The comparison raises an obvious question: How serious does intelligence have to be for a CIA director to personally travel to Moscow to deliver a warning?

For Edward Bogan, a retired CIA operations officer with 24 years of national-security experience, the intelligence did not necessarily have to amount to a highest-confidence assessment. But the decision to send the CIA director suggests Washington considered the threat credible and important enough to warrant a face-to-face warning.

“The fact that a director would get on a plane and come over suggests to me that it was a credible threat, and that it was important to say face to face, you know, don’t do this, irrespective of what we know,” Bogan told RFE/RL.

That does not mean US intelligence has concluded Russia has decided to attack a NATO member or that an attack is imminent. But it suggests Washington saw enough potential risk to communicate directly with Moscow.

A Warning — And Deterrence

The reported focus on the Baltics is significant. All three countries are NATO members and former Soviet republics, and all three share borders with Russia.

The concern may not be that Moscow is preparing for a major war with NATO. A more limited military action or hybrid operation could instead test whether the alliance would respond collectively and whether Moscow could exploit divisions among its members.

Russia has repeatedly denied plans to attack NATO and dismissed such assessments as “nonsense.” Moscow also denied planning to invade Ukraine before launching its full-scale war in February 2022.

For Sean Wiswesser, a former CIA chief of station who wrote a book about Russian intelligence tactics, Ratcliffe’s visit was “an encouraging sign” and showed that Washington was prepared to push back against what he called “the reckless escalation by Russia’s intelligence services.”

But he said a warning would have limited value without a threat of consequences if Moscow ignored it.

“They won’t stop till we stop them,” Wiswesser told RFE/RL. “But for any warning to be effective, it needs to come with consequences for Russia if they fail to heed the warning and cross more alleged red lines.”

His assessment of the broader deterrence problem was stark: “So far it has been only unchecked escalation from Russia and failed deterrence from the alliance,” he said, referring to NATO.

The question, then, is not simply what Washington told Moscow, but whether Russia believes the United States and its allies are prepared to act if the warning is ignored.

Bogan urged caution in assessing Russia’s ability to escalate militarily. “Russia speaks like it has a lot more options than it actually does,” he said.

Russia has substantial military capabilities, but its forces are bogged down in a war in Ukraine that has lasted far longer than the Kremlin had anticipated.

Bogan said observers sometimes imagine Russia as having a large unused military reserve that could suddenly be turned against Europe. “If they had such a capability, they would be applying it to the Ukraine fight,” he said.

That does not mean Russia lacks options. Bogan said the intelligence behind Ratcliffe’s visit could involve an effort to change the military calculus around NATO. “Something’s up,” he said. “Changing the calculus, coming into NATO spaces in some military manner could very well be what it…was about.”

At the same time, Bogan said he did not believe Moscow necessarily wanted a direct confrontation with NATO. “I don’t think they’re prepared to be able to do that,” he said.

A CIA Channel

Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State and a former CIA and Department of Homeland Security intelligence officer, said using the CIA to communicate with adversaries can be appropriate when sensitive issues require a discreet channel and conventional diplomacy is inadequate.

But he questioned whether Ratcliffe was carrying a coherent US policy message to Moscow.

Cash cited what he called the “apparent disjointedness of American policy” and noted the absence of Secretary of State Marco Rubio from the publicly known diplomacy surrounding the visit.

“What policy was Director Ratcliffe actually carrying to Moscow?” Cash asked.

He said the broader concern was whether the administration had an orderly, intelligence-informed process for developing policy.

“The appearance is not of the United States government speaking through a carefully considered national policy but of one would-be autocrat sending an emissary to parley with the representative of another autocrat,” Cash said.

A discreet channel, Cash argued, is useful only if the policy behind the message is coherent and strategically sound.

“If the substance has been poorly conceived — or is at odds with what our allies, our diplomats, our military, and even other parts of our own government understand American policy to be — then the secrecy and sensitivity of the channel do not make the communication more effective,” he said.

“They simply transmit confusion more efficiently.”