Trump says CIA Moscow visit may yield progress

President Donald Trump said “something may come out of” CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s unannounced visit to Moscow, a rare high-level U.S. trip to Russia that the Kremlin confirmed involved contacts with Russian intelligence officials but no meeting with President Vladimir Putin.

Ratcliffe arrived in the Russian capital on Tuesday aboard a U.S. military aircraft and left hours later, according to the BBC. The Trump administration had not formally announced the trip, and there has been no official comment from the CIA, the White House or the Pentagon.

Trump described the meeting as “semi-routine” and declined to say what was discussed. He said Washington “would like to see the war in Ukraine end.”

“I hate to disappoint people,” Trump said during an interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck, according to The Guardian. Asked about speculation that the talks might be connected to possible Russian escalation, Trump said Ratcliffe was “not in there for any of the things that you said.” He added: “Now something may come out of it. We’re working very hard to get that war [in Ukraine] ended.”

Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters Wednesday that Ratcliffe had not met Putin. “There were contacts with the intelligence services,” Peskov said. “There were no meetings with the president of Russia. That’s all I can say on the subject. Naturally, President Putin is briefed immediately about everything.”

Peskov would not describe the substance of the talks. Asked by the BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg what was discussed, he replied: “I have nothing to add to what I’ve already said on the subject.”

He said it was too soon to judge whether the visit would affect efforts to repair U.S.-Russian relations. “How much this will impact the overall process of recovering our bilateral relations from the profound crisis they’re currently in, it is premature to say,” Peskov said. Still, he called contacts between intelligence agencies “a positive phenomenon, a positive process,” saying they often continue “even during the most difficult moments” in relations between the two countries.

The visit first drew attention after a U.S. Air Force C-17A cargo plane and an American diplomatic convoy were seen at a Moscow airport, Al Jazeera reported. The Guardian reported that flight-tracking data for a U.S. government jet had also been captured by several outlets before the Kremlin confirmed the meeting.

Ahead of the trip, the United States informed Ukraine that a senior delegation would be traveling to Moscow and asked Kyiv to suspend strikes until the delegation had departed, a senior Ukrainian official told CBS, according to the BBC. Al Jazeera reported that Axios also said Washington had given Ukraine advance notice of the delegation and requested a pause in strikes on Russia while it was there.

Ratcliffe appears to be one of the highest-ranking U.S. officials to visit Russia during Trump’s second term. The last known visit to Moscow by a CIA director was in November 2021, when William Burns warned Russia against sending troops into Ukraine. Russia launched its full-scale invasion weeks later.

Since then, relations between Washington and Moscow have remained strained, and Russia has faced international isolation and economic sanctions. Trump met Putin at a summit in Alaska last year, but the meeting did not produce a breakthrough, and subsequent U.S.-led peace talks between Russia and Ukraine appear to have stalled.

John Foreman, who served as a British military attaché in Moscow from 2019 to 2022, told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme: “The Americans don’t normally send such a high ranking official to Moscow unannounced at short notice unless something is up.”