CIA director Ratcliffe warned Moscow on NATO and Hormuz, officials say

CIA Director John Ratcliffe held talks in Moscow on Tuesday with Russian intelligence counterparts and did not meet President Vladimir Putin, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday. Putin was briefed the same day. Peskov called the contacts a “positive development” and said it was too early to know whether they would pull U.S.–Russia relations out of what he called a deep crisis. He refused to say what was discussed.

People familiar with the trip told CBS News the purpose was to warn Russia not to attack NATO member states, against U.S. assessments that Moscow could test the alliance. Ratcliffe also raised Iran, they said, and warned of more sanctions if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed to commercial traffic. President Donald Trump, asked about those two subjects, said “none of the above” and described the visit as “sort of semi-routine.” He added that “something may come out of” the trip in the context of his effort to end the war in Ukraine.

The visit became public after a U.S. Air Force C-17 landed at Vnukovo and a diplomatic motorcade moved through the city. Ratcliffe left the same evening. It is his first known trip to Russia as director. The last CIA chief to go to Moscow was William Burns in November 2021, three months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Burns met Putin. Ratcliffe did not.

Ukraine was told a U.S. delegation would be in Moscow and was asked to hold strikes on the capital and other cities from Monday through Wednesday, according to a senior Ukrainian official and later reporting. That request is itself a data point. Washington still needs a quiet window over Russian cities when it sends a spy chief in. Kyiv’s drones have been reaching Tambov, Lipetsk and Belgorod in the same week.

Andrei Soldatov, who studies the Russian services, told the Associated Press that visits of this kind do not happen every year. The last direct flight of a U.S.-registered jet from Europe to Russia, in January, carried special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to see Putin on Ukraine. Ratcliffe’s aircraft was military. The channel was the services, not the presidency.

Peskov’s “too early to say” line is the honest part of the briefing. Intelligence contacts can carry warnings, prisoner names, and limits that never appear in a communiqué. They can also be theatre for two capitals that need to show they still have a phone. Trump’s “semi-routine” phrasing leans toward the second reading. The NATO warning, if the CBS account holds, leans toward the first.

The Hormuz message sits in a different file. Iran and Oman are drafting a traffic plan that would keep military ships out of the strait. The United States has said the waterway is an international passage. A CIA director repeating a sanctions threat in Moscow, while Qatar’s prime minister is in Tehran, is a way to put that file in front of a government that still sells weapons and oil cooperation to Iran.

What the trip does not do is reset the war. Russian forces remain in Ukraine. Ukrainian drones keep flying. Peskov still calls the relationship a crisis. The measurable facts are narrower: a C-17 on the Vnukovo ramp, no meeting with Putin, a requested pause in Ukrainian strikes, and two warnings that U.S. officials say were delivered even if the president prefers to call the errand routine.