Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
CIA Boss John Ratcliffe’s stealth mission to Moscow has triggered a frenzy over the real reason behind the covert trip.
For a week, the covert Moscow visit of CIA Director John Ratcliffe on August 25 was described in Washington and in the Russian press as a routine intelligence contact, a chance to warn the Kremlin against attacking NATO and to press Moscow to cut its ties to Iran.
A new detail reported this week by the Russian outlet Agentstvo suggests it was far more than that, and that Vladimir Putin himself came within a whisker of taking part.
According to Agentstvo’s reporting, which cites a source close to the Kremlin, Putin had been scheduled to meet Ratcliffe in person during the visit, but pulled out after his intelligence chiefs briefed him on the substance of the American’s message.
Ratcliffe had previously pressed the Russians to agree immediately to end the war and had floated a three-way presidential summit between Donald Trump, Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky.
According to the Kremlin source cited by Agentstvo, Ratcliffe argued that Russia’s military and economic position was deteriorating and that Moscow would be better off striking a deal now rather than waiting to be weakened further.
The message, the source complained, sounded as if “Volodymyr Zelensky is already standing on Poklonnaya Hill, looking at the Kremlin through binoculars”, a way of dismissing the American assessment as detached from the battlefield.
Meetings with the spy chiefs, but not with Putin
Ratcliffe met separately with Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and with Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Federal Security Service (FSB).
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed the intelligence-channel talks the day after the visit and called them a “positive development”, while stressing there were “no meetings of any kind with the Russian president”.
Peskov added at the time that it was “too early to say to what extent this will affect the overall process of bringing our bilateral relations out of the deepest crisis they are currently in”.
Agentstvo’s account now fills in what happened behind that carefully worded readout: a personal Putin-Ratcliffe encounter had been on the table and was actively taken off.
A three-way summit already rejected by the Kremlin
The trilateral summit idea itself is not new to Moscow. The Trump White House had floated it before; Zelensky had signaled willingness, but Putin had declined.
Ratcliffe put the same proposal back on the table during the Moscow trip, sources told Kyiv Post, and concluded that Bortnikov in particular might be “a constructive player” able to nudge Putin back toward US-mediated talks.
Kremlin officials, according to the Agentstvo source, told Ratcliffe that a leaders’ meeting would only take place to “finalize agreements”, not to negotiate them from scratch.
US officials briefed Zelensky on the substance of Ratcliffe’s Moscow talks and on the summit proposal on August 28, according to Axios.
Warnings alongside the peace pitch
The peace push was paired with a sharper message. Ratcliffe warned the Russians against reading US restraint in the recent Iran conflict as weakness, and made clear that any large-scale Russian escalation in Ukraine would push Trump closer to Zelensky, according to a Washington Post account summarized by Meduza.
The New York Times had reported that Ratcliffe did not threaten Russia with specific consequences during the visit, as Ukrainska Pravda noted, and Trump himself has publicly played the trip down, calling it “semi-routine” business.
Peskov has since dismissed the fresh reporting about a canceled Putin meeting as “information hoaxes”, according to the UNN summary of the Agentstvo article. As of publication, no follow-up contact between Ratcliffe and Putin, and no date for a Trump-Putin-Zelensky summit, has been announced.
