In a rare high-level in-person encounter between American and Russian officials amid years of strained bilateral relations, CIA Director John Ratcliffe has made an unannounced trip to the Russian capital Moscow, multiple sources have confirmed. CBS, the US news partner of the BBC, first reported on the visit, which saw Ratcliffe travel to Moscow on a United States military aircraft on Tuesday.
Flight tracking data from independent aviation monitoring service FlightRadar24 corroborates the report: a large US C-17 military transport plane departed Riga, Latvia at 05:50 GMT, touched down at Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport at approximately 07:04 GMT, and departed the Russian capital shortly before 16:00 GMT. Social media users posted both footage of the military plane on its landing approach and purported video of a diplomatic motorcade moving through central Moscow, matching the timeline of the reported visit.
Neither the Washington nor Moscow has officially confirmed the purpose of the visit, the topics under discussion, or which Russian officials Ratcliffe met with during his day trip. BBC News has reached out to the CIA, the White House, and the US Pentagon for additional comment on the trip, but has not yet received a response.
This visit marks Ratcliffe’s first in-person trip to Russia since he assumed the role of CIA Director, even though he has maintained remote and indirect contact with Russian intelligence counterparts over his tenure. The CIA chief has prior experience engaging with Russian officials on high-stakes consular matters: he played a key role in negotiations that secured the release of Ksenia Karelina, a Russian-American citizen who had been detained in Russia for more than a year on charges of providing support to Ukraine’s military. The CIA also participated in the 2024 major prisoner swap agreement between Washington and Moscow, which secured the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former US Marine Paul Whelan, and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva.
Ratcliffe’s visit is one of the highest-profile trips by a senior US official to Russia since Donald Trump began his second term as US President. Last year, Trump held a widely anticipated summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, but the meeting failed to produce any major breakthrough on de-escalation or a resolution to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Subsequent US-mediated peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine have since stalled, leaving the conflict in a protracted stalemate.
Bilateral relations between the US and Russia have remained severely strained since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In response to the invasion, Western nations imposed sweeping economic sanctions on Russia, isolating the country from much of the global financial and trading system, and high-level in-person diplomatic encounters between the two nuclear powers have become increasingly uncommon in the years since the invasion began.