Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe paid an unannounced visit to Moscow yesterday, spending eight hours in the Russian capital before returning to the US. Though he visited the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that they had met – though Ratcliffe certainly spoke to his counterpart Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR external intelligence service, and other top Russian security officials.
The list of topics urgent enough to prompt the first personal visit of a US cabinet-level official to the Kremlin in six months is short. Ratcliffe could have been responding to reports of a planned Russian escalation against NATO, trying to enlist the Kremlin’s help for Donald Trump’s stalling campaign against Iran or discussing a draconian sanctions bill that could devastate the Russian economy that lies locked and loaded in Congress pending its final reading.
Europe’s panicked reaction to Ratcliffe’s unannounced visit is a sign of a dangerously febrile atmosphere
But the true mystery that made the flying visit unusual – and also, for many observers, alarming – was that Ratcliffe was clearly in Moscow to communicate something too sensitive or too urgent to be discussed during his regular phone calls with Naryshkin. The last CIA director to make an urgent trip to the Kremlin was William Burns in November 2021. He came bearing a message for Putin not to invade Ukraine.
Some analysts have speculated that Ratcliffe’s mission was to prevent an imminent provocation against NATO targets in Europe which the CIA had gotten wind of. “It could be to say, ‘We know what you are thinking about doing, and you better not,'” Beth Sanner, a former US deputy director of national intelligence under both Trump and Biden, told the Wall Street Journal.
Other observers have pointed out that it’s Iran, not Ukraine, that is Trump’s current top foreign policy priority. Rising gasoline prices and knock-on consequences in the cost of transportation and food could spell electoral disaster for Trump in November’s midterm elections. Getting the Kremlin to cut off its flow of military supplies and intelligence to Tehran is a missing link in Trump’s attempts to break Iranian resistance to a peace deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran is the only foreign policy issue that Trump can afford to care about right now,” argues Professor Sam Greene of King’s College London.
Ratcliffe’s visit comes as negotiations to end the Ukraine war seem to have stalled. Trump’s envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff postponed a visit to Moscow that had been scheduled for this month. Congress returns from recess in September, and is likely to reaffirm its vote in favor of the Lindsey O. Graham Act on Sanctions Against Russia (which passed on first reading in June by 226 to 195, despite Republican opposition). That bill is set to impose drastic sanctions on India and China for buying Russian oil, sparking a new round of trade wars. Xi Jinping is due in Washington on September 24 for an official visit. And mid-term elections are on November 3.
The last thing Trump needs right now, embattled by his failure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and his latest trade spat with Canada, is to deal with is a massive global trade war with India and China, or the fallout of a Russian provocation against NATO.
Whatever the specific message or messages Ratcliffe actually delivered, Europe’s panicked reaction to the unannounced visit is a sign of a dangerously febrile atmosphere. Alarm is running high for two good reasons. One is a very real uptick in sabotage attacks, including a powerful explosion at the EMCO arms plant in Bulgaria on August 10, an explosion and fire at the KNDS Ammo Italy plant on August 13 and a large-scale power outage on the same day that halted operations at several petrochemical facilities, including ExxonMobil, in the Netherlands. France says it has been targeted by a Russian cyberattack. The Estonian defense company Milrem Robotics was targeted in an arson attack on August 15. An arms cache was found in a German forest and Polish police arrested a Russian national allegedly recruited by Russian intelligence to assassinate a dual US-Ukrainian citizen. And three explosive drones of unknown origin have been found at Leipzig airport, a major logistics hub for both DHL and some Ukrainian airlines.
The other reason for increasing tensions is a steady drum-beat of warnings by US and European intelligence agencies over recent weeks that Russia is preparing some kind of attack on NATO. Two weeks ago, the German newspaper Bild reported that NATO had developed a military response concept to any possible Russian assault on the Baltic states. It would include attacks on Kaliningrad and strikes deep inside Russia. Citing German military sources, the paper also reported that the attack plan included special-forces attacks on Russian airfields, military bases, defense plants, bridges and railways, as well as deep drone strikes and the recruitment of anti-Kremlin Russians for sabotage operations inside the country.
NATO has recently mounted exercises near the Russian Baltic sea exclave of Kaliningrad, with US planes reportedly jamming Russian military communications for two hours. There’s an “increased risk” of Russian unconventional attacks on Europe, warns Former British Member of Parliament Bob Seely, author of The New Total War. “But also an increased risk of stumbling into confrontation too.”
One thing is clear. The White House’s most urgent priority – and the true purpose of Ratcliffe’s visit to the Kremlin – may well be Iran. But that’s not the conflict that Europe is worrying about as its talk of war ratchets up.
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