On 25 August, a US Air Force C-17A Globemaster III landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport and sat on the tarmac for several hours. Flight trackers had it before officials did. By the time the diplomatic motorcade footage surfaced on Russian social media, the story had escaped: CIA Director John Ratcliffe was in Moscow, the first CIA director to visit the Russian capital since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Wall Street Journal reported the purpose first. CBS News and RFE/RL have since independently confirmed the thrust of the reporting. Ratcliffe was there to tell Moscow not to attack a NATO member state. RFE/RL’s sources put a sharper point on it: the warning was specifically about Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Everyone involved is working hard to make it sound like nothing.
Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR, confirmed on Thursday that the meeting happened and immediately drained it of significance. A “working-level meeting,” he said. A “standard working format.” Nothing special. He noted that he meets foreign intelligence chiefs almost weekly, in person or online. Dmitry Peskov confirmed Ratcliffe met intelligence officials but not Putin, though Putin was briefed. President Trump called the trip “very sort of semi-routine,” then added that “something may come out of it.”
You do not send the director of the CIA to Moscow on a semi-routine basis. There is no such thing.
Why the assessment changed
For four and a half years, Washington’s working assumption was that Putin would not open a second front while the first one was consuming him. That assumption has been quietly retired.
One factor appears to be Ukraine’s increasingly effective deep-strike campaign. Wave after wave of long-range drones have hit refineries, logistics hubs and warehouses inside Russia, from the Afipsky refinery to the Astrakhan gas processing plant to Ozon distribution centres. The concern in Washington is that mounting pressure inside Russia may not simply pin Putin down; it could encourage Moscow to seek leverage elsewhere.
Heather Conley of the American Enterprise Institute framed the logic to the Journal: the objective is not territory, it is fracture. Challenge NATO’s credibility, and separate the United States from its allies. As she put it, the question mark is how Washington would respond.
That is precisely the question a limited incursion is designed to ask.
The summer of alarm bells
Ratcliffe’s flight was the culmination of something, not the start of it.
A letter dated 30 July, seen by RFE/RL, went to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warning of a “deteriorating security environment” in the Baltics, citing an “increased frequency of airspace violations and drone incursions.” It was signed by the three Baltic commissioners - Kaja Kallas, Andrius Kubilius and Valdis Dombrovskis - along with their Polish and Finnish EU commissioners. That put senior European officials from five of NATO’s most exposed eastern and northern members on the same piece of paper.
RFE/RL also independently reports additional summer intelligence about possible Russian false-flag operations and explicitly says there was no indication of an imminent conventional attack. The reporting also makes clear that the exposure is not confined to the Baltics. Recent cases of alleged or suspected Russian involvement in assassination attempts, arson and drone incursions span Germany, Poland and Slovakia.
This is the shape of the actual threat. Not tank columns crossing a border, but sabotage, deniability, and a NATO membership arguing among itself about whether Article 5 has been triggered.
The British front
Run parallel to all of this: London is now being threatened directly.
On Monday, on his first foreign trip as prime minister, Andy Burnham stood outside St Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv on Ukraine’s 35th independence day and announced Britain would release classified technical information on British-made Storm Shadow components to help Ukraine build its own long-range missiles.
Peskov called it adding fuel to the fire. Burnham’s reply: “Who started the fire? That’s the question, isn’t it?”
Maria Zakharova then warned that any British military facilities and equipment, in Ukraine and beyond its borders, could become targets. Kremlin adviser Andrei Fedorov, a former deputy foreign minister, told the BBC that Moscow had not entirely ruled out paramilitary action against British factories producing drone and missile components, and that a response might eventually be visible rather than merely verbal. Attacks from “unknown sources” is the operative phrase, and it is not subtle.
Classified Storm Shadow component data are the escalation Moscow has spent three years insisting it would not tolerate, the Kremlin’s red line. Handing over the means of production, rather than the weapons themselves, moves the target from a stockpile to an industrial base - one that sits in Lancashire and Hertfordshire, not Kharkiv.
Connecting the dots
A number of things are happening at once.
Ukraine’s drone campaign has made Russia’s war economy hurt. At the same time, Moscow appears to be looking for softer places to apply pressure: the Baltic states, where deniability is cheap, and Britain, where the industrial supply chain is exposed. And Washington, having watched this develop over a summer of intelligence, sent its spy chief to say the quiet part in person.
And here is the contradiction: Washington is warning Moscow not to test NATO at precisely the moment it is telling the alliance’s European members to prepare to carry more of the burden themselves.
The uncomfortable precedent is November 2021. Bill Burns flew to Moscow and warned against invading Ukraine. By his own account, Putin was unmoved. The invasion came three months later.
That does not mean this warning fails. It means the warning itself is the signal worth reading. You send a CIA director when you have specific intelligence and you want the other side to know you have it.
What to watch
The NATO readout. Elbridge Colby met Mark Rutte and allied ambassadors in Brussels on Thursday, telling them Europe must take primary responsibility for its conventional defence while insisting the United States remains committed to NATO. The more important question now is what allies were told behind closed doors about Ratcliffe’s Moscow warning - and what leaks out afterward.
The Iran thread. CBS reports Ratcliffe also raised Iran, warning of further sanctions if the Strait of Hormuz does not reopen to shipping. Ratcliffe’s trip came a day after Washington launched a new pressure campaign against Tehran. A single trip carrying two warnings tells you something about how thin the channels have become.
Sabotage attribution. Watch how European governments characterise the next factory fire, rail incident, drone sighting, territorial waters incursion. The shift from “under investigation” to naming Russia is the real escalation ladder here.
Whether Moscow answers. Naryshkin says he meets counterparts weekly. If the channel is genuinely routine, expect a reciprocal contact within weeks. Silence would be the more telling response.
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Rescue efforts in China are being led by the People’s Liberation Army, but state media said they face multiple challenges.The Air Force did manage to use a brief weather window to fly a drone over the area to try to find survivors and assess how safe it was for rescue teams to enter. The border town of Gyirong is the main crossing for people and traffic heading between Nepal and China. Video footage appears to show a crushing wall of water crashing through buildings and washing away trucks and cars. Thousands of pilgrims were making a journey along this route from Nepal towards a sacred mountain in Tibet. This is also one of the most controlled and politically sensitive regions of China. Access to Tibet is restricted for foreigners. All the information we receive is from Chinese state media which is also carefully controlled - BBC
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The journals…
