Wednesday 26 / August / 2026
US CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow on Tuesday, USnews outlets reported, saying he would be attending meetings.
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 cited an unnamed 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. 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 its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ratcliffe's predecessor William Burns had talks with President Vladimir Putin in 2021.
Last such flight into Russia was in January this year
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.
