Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe did not meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during his surprise visit to Moscow on Tuesday, a Kremlin spokesman said.
Tuesday’s ‘Moscow Mystery’ of an unannounced U.S. military flight from NATO Europe to a Moscow airport carrying CIA boss John Ratcliffe was not for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as some had suspected during a bout of intense speculation about the flight, the Russian leader’s personal spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday morning.
While the Kremlin has said little on the meeting and U.S. official sources even less, Putin’s spokesman did state the purpose of the short visit was for peer-to-peer talks between CIA man Ratcliffe and the Russian intelligence agencies. Peskov said: “I can only tell you that there were contacts through the intelligence services. I can assure you that there were no meetings with the Russian president”, Russian state media reports.
Peskov added that President Putin had been briefed on the talks. As for how they would impact American-Russian relations, Peskov went on: “It’s too early to say how much this will impact the overall process of bringing our bilateral relations out of the deep crisis they are in”.
The visit is thought to be the first — at least publicly known — visit to Moscow by the head of the CIA since 2021, when Biden’s director Bill Burns delivered a message of warning to the Kremlin to think twice before attacking Ukraine.
As reported, the trip has excited considerable comment given it was unannounced, yet the track of the C-17 Globemaster was fully visible to the public given it flew with its transponders turned on. The aircraft had transited from Andrews AFB near Washington over the weekend and was joined in Riga, Latvia — the location of a major NATO command — by a U.S. military executive transport Boeing.
The airspace above eastern Europe is sufficiently dangerous as an active warzone that most political visits by Western heads of state or diplomats to Ukraine fly as far as Poland before transferring to special VIP trains for transfer overland to Kyiv. As earlier reported, it is stated this issue was overcome in Ratcliffe’s case by a request to Ukraine not to launch drone attacks against Russia for the duration of his visit, to keep the skies clear.