CIA chief’s visit to Moscow is shrouded in lies and half-truths amid ‘war’ of Russian espionage in Europe

Amid a surge of Russian acts of sabotage across Europe, CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s meeting last week with the heads of the Kremlin’s intelligence agencies has sparked all manner of speculation, including suggestions of a possible Russian invasion. Washington, preoccupied with its own conflict with Iran — an ally of Moscow — and just months from its midterm elections, has not clarified the purpose of the visit and has fueled theories through a series of selective leaks. Intelligence experts wonder why Donald Trump would suddenly be concerned with helping Europe.

Since Ratcliffe’s arrival in Moscow on August 25 several theories, based on anonymous sources, have circulated. The Wall Street Journal reported that the CIA chief warned the Kremlin not to attack NATO because Washington knows Moscow is planning a “limited assault” on its eastern flank in the short term. The New York Times said Ratcliffe gave his Russian intelligence counterparts a message for President Vladimir Putin aimed at convincing him that Russia is doing poorly in the war. Axios reported that the CIA director proposed a meeting between the presidents of Russia, the United States and Ukraine, and Bloomberg wrote that European representatives were not briefed on the content of the talks. The visit came a couple of weeks after Moscow released former U.S. Marine Robert Gilman from prison, and more Americans remain detained in Russia. Donald Trump downplayed the event as a routine trip.

This was the first visit by a CIA chief to Moscow since November 2021, when William Burns went to the Russian capital to warn the Kremlin not to launch its invasion of Ukraine. At that time Washington had evidence that thousands of Russian troops were being deployed for such an assault despite denials from Moscow — a deployment that ultimately materialized in February 2022.

On this occasion, however, there is no evidence of any deployment to invade the eastern European Union. Preparations for a possible mobilization inside Russia appear aimed at sending more troops to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, and after more than four exhausting years of war, opening another front and instituting forced conscription could have unpredictable consequences within Russian society.

Europe today is, however, the battlefield of an extensive shadow war. When an attack, an assassination or a wave of migrants directed from abroad paralyzes a government, the hostile state that provoked the crisis exploits that paralysis to extract concessions. Russian intelligence services, for example, try to destabilize the bloc to push it to abandon Ukraine, but Iranian, Chinese and Moroccan intelligence services, among others, also operate inside the espionage field.

In recent weeks alone German authorities have found three drones loaded with explosives near Leipzig airport — a hub that is also used for military shipments to Ukraine — and several assassination attempts inside the bloc have been identified, including the successful killing in Poland of Semión Skrepetski, a Russian artist critical of Putin. These operations form part of an escalation that includes cutting undersea cables, spying on military facilities with commercial drones and probing European unity by sending in hundreds of migrants from the Belarus border who were brought from the Middle East.

Even Spain is not immune to this war despite being at the far end of Europe. Spanish security services suspect that Ukrainian defector Maxim Kuzminov was murdered in the Mediterranean province of Alicante in 2024 by Russian intelligence agents, but they have been unable to prove it to date, and some companies have been targeted by cyberattacks aimed at extracting internal information or causing financial losses.

Only the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, and the heads of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Aleksandr Bortnikov and Sergey Naryshkin respectively, know what was discussed at the August 25 meeting. And the CIA is not an entirely reliable information source either, having allegedly spied on European leaders such as Angela Merkel for years. According to European and Russian sources consulted by this newspaper, there was no ultimatum, although everything surrounding the meeting amounts to hearsay.

“I don’t think it was a routine visit, as the SVR chief also said. He must have delivered something very serious in person to the heads of the Russian intelligence services,” says Grigoriy Serscikov, an intelligence and political violence expert based in Amsterdam. “But without being part of the very small circle of people with access to reliable information, it is very hard to speculate,” he cautions.

“I think the conversation may have focused on the United States’ stance in the face of any provocation, rather than on an open Russian attack on a NATO country. That would involve communicating the current U.S. administration’s position in the event that Article 5 of the Alliance were triggered — by which an attack on any NATO country is considered an attack on the whole bloc,” Serscikov adds.

Andrei Soldatov, a journalist familiar with the inner workings of Russia’s secret services, rejects the ultimatum theory. “This kind of news does not withstand rigorous analysis. It is absurd to think he came to warn that Russia will attack a NATO country in a few years. What does ‘in a few years’ mean? This situation cannot be compared to 2021,” says the expert, founder of the Agentura portal.

“As for the sabotage version, it sounds somewhat more plausible, but I am also quite skeptical, because we are talking about the Trump administration, for which his own interests and those of the United States always come first. Why would the CIA director suddenly reprimand Russia for actions that threaten its European partners, who do not exactly inspire Trump? If that were the case he would have exploited it publicly. He would have demanded something publicly from the Europeans in return and proclaimed himself their savior,” the Russian espionage expert reflects.

In fact, the Trump administration published a major strategic plan last year that placed Europe’s security largely in Europe’s hands and even contemplated interfering in its internal politics. “The current U.S. administration has given up on Europe and no longer sees it necessary to inform them,” Serscikov recalls.

“These kinds of contacts,” Soldatov adds, “occur when U.S. intelligence agencies have information relevant to their national security. When there is a threat to U.S. citizens or facilities, such as military bases, or to free hostages.”

In his view, the most plausible explanation would revolve around the U.S. conflict with Iran ahead of the upcoming midterm elections in November. “They obtained information that the Iranians were planning some kind of attack, and the CIA believed the Russians could prevent it, or maybe they asked them to stop supplying intelligence to the Iranian regime.”

“If it had to do with Iran, the Trump administration would not admit it publicly. That is why other theories have surfaced,” Soldatov stresses.

The war of the secret services

Russian experts consider absurd the idea that Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow to tell Putin “the truth” about the war that his own inner circle is not telling him. According to U.S. media, the CIA chief allegedly transmitted that “truth” to SVR and FSB officials — the very agencies, together with the military intelligence service (GRU), that brief Putin each morning. “It makes no sense,” Soldatov laughs.

Moreover, from the Kremlin’s point of view the war is not going badly. Its forces have pushed the gray zone of the front to within about ten kilometers of Sloviansk, where paramilitaries sparked the Donbas war in 2014, and the Defense Ministry has threatened to freeze the Ukrainian population this winter by launching thousands of missiles and drones against its energy infrastructure, already seriously damaged last year. For that reason Kyiv has urgently asked the West for more air-defense systems.

All Russian businessmen agree the economy is dire, and military spending and debt payments consume more than half the budget, so that social cuts are expected. In addition, the independent outlet Mediazona has confirmed the names of 242,747 Russian dead servicemembers and estimates a much higher real figure, without counting the wounded. But none of this matters to Putin, who frames his crusade with reference to the 27 million Soviet dead of World War II.

Western support for Ukraine has prevented Putin from achieving his ambition to dominate Ukraine. For that reason, Russian sources believe the Kremlin might consider some form of escalation with Europe to intimidate it.

One option Moscow has openly considered is seizing a European ship in response to the interception of one of its tankers under sanctions. The United States and the United Kingdom have already detained a couple of vessels. “It is possible; public pressure is rising and Russia could resort to such an operation as a public-relations strategy,” says Serscikov.

The expert deems “a certain increase in Russian sabotage operations totally possible,” but maintains that a massive campaign “is extremely unlikely for the simple reason that Russian intelligence services lack the capacity for large-scale recruitment.”

Serscikov, a contributor to the Russian intelligence publication Nevidimoye Izmereniye (Unknown Dimension), emphasizes that espionage has changed in recent decades and these acts “are no longer carried out by professional saboteurs, but by ordinary people, often with criminal records, recruited [by the secret services] in exchange for money” via Telegram and other social networks.

This covert war is also being fought at another level inside Russia and Ukraine, where sabotage and killings are commonplace and as complex as the explosion of a transport truck on a Crimea bridge or the sudden appearance of drones over several Russian air bases that had been hidden inside cargo vehicles without any of their drivers being aware.

Serscikov notes in one of his articles that Western intelligence imposed red lines on Ukrainian secret services after the Donbas war in 2014 that have been gradually lifted since the full-scale invasion of February 24, 2022. With Western information and technology, their operations have leapt from traditional espionage to targeted actions carried out using citizens manipulated remotely according to their psychological profiles.

“The real front is fought on the internet, in the media and in the collective mind. Victory does not depend only on drone strikes or the killing of generals, but on who better controls the perception of reality and raises the cost of an attack to an unsustainable level for the enemy,” Serscikov reflects.

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