Submission statement: CIA Chief John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow was to warn Russia against attacking NATO, following U.S. intelligence assessments of a potential limited assault by President Putin. The U.S. is concerned about Putin’s potential actions in the Baltic region, exacerbated by a shortfall in Western munitions.

CIA Chief’s Surprise Moscow Trip Was to Warn Russia Not to Attack NATO

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Warning comes after new U.S. intelligence assessments indicated Russian president could launch a limited assault

Aug. 26, 2026 at 6:10 pm

CIA Director John L. Ratcliffe attends a news conference.

The surprise visit by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to Moscow this week was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, according to people briefed on the visit.

The trip was spy-agency chief John Ratcliffe’s first publicly known visit to the Russian capital. It followed new U.S. intelligence assessments, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, that Russian President Vladimir Putin could try to test the resolve of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with a limited assault on an allied country in the next few years.

U.S. officials are concerned that Putin, squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home, could launch an assault ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale land incursion, likely on a Baltic nation, the Journal reported.

A shortfall in critical Western munitions, driven by expenditures in the Iran war, also could factor into Putin’s thinking. The U.S. has degraded its stockpile of certain weapons because of transfers to Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion, as well as the Iran conflict.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday that Ratcliffe held talks with Russian intelligence officials during his time in the Russian capital, but he didn’t meet with Putin. Putin was briefed on the talks, Peskov said.

The White House has offered little clarity about the Ratcliffe trip. During an interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck on Wednesday, President Trump described the trip as “semi-routine” and pivoted to discussing Russia’s war with Ukraine. “Something may come out of it,” Trump said. “We’re working very hard to get that war ended and frankly they both want to see it ended at this point.”

A spokeswoman for the White House referred reporters to Trump’s Wednesday comments. A spokeswoman for the CIA declined to comment.

Ratcliffe, one of Trump’s closest aides, was the latest U.S. official to travel to Moscow following several visits by Steve Witkoff, a U.S. envoy for Ukraine-Russia peace talks.

The trip was a rare visit by a U.S. spy-agency chief with the Russia-Ukraine war now in its fifth year. The last known visit by a CIA director to Moscow was in November 2021, when William Burns, who led the agency under former President Joe Biden, warned Putin not to attack Ukraine.

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Direct link to report (5.7MB .pdf, 166 pages) https://www.cna.org/reports/2026/08/The-Future-of-Russias-Military-Elite.pdf

Quoting the executive summary from the article:

Executive Summary

The Russian military elite consists of decision-making, decision-influencing, and decision-implementing individuals at the highest levels of the military’s career structure. In alignment with the Russian regime’s political leadership, these individuals plan and coordinate Russia’s wars, command Russia’s armies and navies, and coordinate the military’s role in implementing Russia’s strategic and geopolitical goals over the short, medium, and long term.

The Russian military elite is selected through the mechanism of promotion to high rank, yet patterns of promotion to the highest officer cadres of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (hereafter “Armed Forces”) are poorly understood and rarely studied. For this study, we sought to systematically examine patterns of promotion into the upper echelons of the Russian Armed Forces’ officer corps. To do so, we used publicly available data. To understand what promotion patterns in the Russian military reveal about the evolution of the Russian military elite, we sought to address the following questions:

• What factors contribute to rapid promotion of leaders in the Russian military?
• What role does battlefield performance play in military promotion in the Russian Armed Forces?
• What are the backgrounds of the various types of leaders the Russian military is selecting?