CIA director in Moscow for meetings — US media reports
Deutsche Welle · LC · trust 39/100
US media outlets say John Ratcliffe was in Russia to attend meetings. Flight tracking websites had earlier detected the arrival of a US military transport plane at Moscow's Vnukovo Airport.
https://p.dw.com/p/5JNRi Ratcliffe is US President Donald Trump's former director of national intelligence [FILE: Jul 31, 2026] Image: Nathan Howard/REUTERS/AP Photo/picture alliance Advertisement US spy chief John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow on Tuesday where he is attending meetings, US news outlets reported.
CBS News and Axios both reported the visit, but stopped short of saying who Ratcliffe was meeting with or the topics on the agenda. CBS News quoted sources familiar with the situation as confirming Ratcliffe's trip, saying it was his first known visit to Russia as CIA chief. Axios separately confirmed it quoting a US official.
Earlier on Tuesday, data from Flightradar24 showed that a US military transport plane used by the US Air Force flew from Latvia to Moscow's Vnukovo Airport in Russia . The flight-tracking website later reported that the same plane departed Moscow hours later.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he did "not have such information" when asked about the arrival of a US military plane in the Russian captial.
If the reports prove accurate, it would be the first known time that a CIA director has visited Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ratcliffe's predecessor William Burns had talks with President Vladimir Putin in 2021.
High-ranking US visits to Russia have become extremely uncommon amid the war with Ukraine.
The last time a military transport plane of this kind flew into Moscow was in January of this year.
At that point, it was ferrying Trump's negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner into the capital as the US tried to broker some kind of truce between Moscow and Kyiv.
That meeting, the second of two in back-to-back months , also came soon after the US abducting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and just over a month before the war with Iran was launched.
The US-brokered talks have slowed in the last six months, partly as US bandwidth is occupied by the war in Iran and also amid little tangible progress between Moscow and Kyiv.
Ukraine has intensified long-range attacks into Russia and started targeting its petroleum and oil industries and other contentious targets like the Wildberries online retailer in recent months. Russia has also increased its volume of attacks on civilian and non-military targets in Ukraine.
Nevertheless, both Russia and Ukraine also maintain that they would be willing to engage in negotiations under the right circumstances — albeit showing few signs of agreement on what would need to happen to facilitate talks.
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