Kremlin: Ratcliffe Did Not Meet Putin During Moscow Visit

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed Wednesday that CIA Director John Ratcliffe did not sit down with Vladimir Putin during his unannounced trip to Moscow, telling reporters the contacts instead unfolded strictly between American and Russian intelligence officers. According to CBS News, which first reported the visit, Peskov said Ratcliffe held talks with Russian intelligence counterparts but "did not meet President Vladimir Putin."

The spokesman added that Putin was nonetheless kept fully informed. "Of course, the president is immediately informed about everything," Peskov said, confirming that Putin had been briefed, while again stressing that Putin did not meet Ratcliffe. Peskov described the contacts as occurring "on the intelligence agencies' level." He was careful not to oversell the significance of the encounter, noting that it was too soon to predict whether the intelligence officials' meeting might help get bilateral U.S.-Russian relations out of what he called a "deep crisis" more than four and a half years into Russia's war on Ukraine.

The trip itself came together with almost no advance notice. A military transport aircraft — an American Boeing C-17 Globemaster III — landed at Moscow's Vnukovo International Airport, according to flight tracking website Flightradar24, appearing to have initially taken off from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. A Latvian defense ministry spokesperson confirmed the flight had passed through Riga and was "properly coordinated and authorized for operation within the airspace." Neither the CIA nor the White House offered public comment in the immediate aftermath, though U.S. officials later privately confirmed the trip took place.

The secrecy fueled a burst of speculation across Western media about whether Washington was pursuing a diplomatic breakthrough with Moscow. President Trump, asked directly about the purpose of the visit, dismissed suggestions that Ratcliffe had gone to raise alarms about Russian designs on NATO territory or to seek Moscow's help reopening the Strait of Hormuz. "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," Trump said. "Now something may come out, you know, out of it. We're working very hard to get that (Ukraine) war ended, and frankly, they both want to see it ended at this point." Trump's team has separately characterized the trip as "semi-routine" rather than a diplomatic breakthrough.

The intelligence-channel framing fits a broader pattern of quiet CIA-FSB contacts that have persisted even as political relations between Washington and Moscow have frozen over Ukraine. The visit was the first known trip to Moscow by a CIA director since William Burns travelled there in 2021. Russia expert Andrei Soldatov told the Associated Press that visits like the one by Ratcliffe do not "happen every year." Ratcliffe himself is no stranger to sensitive backchannel diplomacy with Moscow: the CIA has played a role in recent U.S.-Russia detainee exchanges, including the April 2025 release of a U.S.-Russian dual national Ksenia Karelina, whose case Ratcliffe personally negotiated, and the agency was also involved in the 2024 prisoner exchange that secured the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Marine veteran Paul Whelan.

There were also signs Washington took unusual precautions around the trip. A senior Ukrainian official told the Associated Press that Washington informed Kyiv a delegation would be traveling to the Russian capital and asked it to suspend strikes until it left — a request that applied specifically to Moscow, St. Petersburg and some northern regions, while strikes on other parts of Russia continued.

For now, the Trump administration has offered no independent confirmation of what was discussed, leaving Peskov's account as the only public description of the meeting's substance. Given the stalled state of Ukraine peace efforts and simmering tensions over Iran, any continued intelligence-level dialogue between Washington and Moscow — however limited — is likely to draw close scrutiny from both allies and critics of the administration's Russia posture in the days ahead.