President Donald Trump brushed aside the possibility that Russia would attack NATO, telling reporters in the Oval Office on August 27, 2026, that no such threat hangs over the alliance — a conclusion he said came out of his own dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and one that ran against what US intelligence warnings were saying.
Asked whether Putin had given him that assurance, Trump said: “He’s not going to be attacking a NATO territory.”
Pressed on whether CIA Director John Ratcliffe had delivered exactly that warning in Moscow days earlier, the president declined to comment, though he again insisted Russia would not strike.
The administration never announced Ratcliffe’s August 25 flight to the Russian capital. Two sightings gave the trip away that same day: a US Air Force jet touching down at a Moscow airport, and a diplomatic motorcade making its way through the city. No CIA director had gone to Russia since then-CIA Director William Burns delivered a warning to the Kremlin in November 2021 against sending troops into Ukraine — the first such visit by any agency chief in the years since, and Ratcliffe’s first known one in the role. Three months after that Burns warning, Russia invaded.
What the CIA Chief Carried to Moscow
Two messages went to his Russian counterparts, Ratcliffe reportedly delivered: a warning against attacks on NATO member states, and pressure on Moscow to end economic and military support for Iran while Washington works to squeeze Tehran’s finances. He also cautioned that more US sanctions would follow if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed to shipping traffic. A senior Ukrainian official said Kyiv, informed that a US delegation was heading to Moscow, was asked to pause its strikes while the Americans were in the country.
Behind the visit sits an intelligence picture far darker than the president’s public read. An increasingly weak position in Ukraine is where US officials concluded Russia had slipped, and that vulnerability, in their reading, could push it toward action against NATO. The aim would be to drive up the cost of backing Kyiv and force a settlement on Moscow’s terms. Washington will not risk another conflict, Putin likely believes, because it would collide with American public opinion — a judgment that appeared in one recent assessment. An imminent attack was not indicated anywhere, though sabotage, cyber or drone operations, or even a land grab in Europe all figured as possibilities across weeks of warnings.
A narrower menu had appeared in earlier assessments: cyber and hybrid operations on alliance soil that Putin might authorize while stopping short of conventional war. The point of such moves, in that reading, would not be to ignite a war but to test how united NATO remains and how far the Trump administration is willing to go in defending allies. Among the examples officials pointed to were drones entering Romanian airspace, a rise in suspected sabotage and hacking across Europe, and a Russian missile that crossed into Poland on July 30.
Article 5 of the NATO treaty commits members to defend one another. Its one invocation came from the United States, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A limited assault within the next few years is how Putin could test the alliance, according to reporting on leaked intelligence.
The president has already worked to cool things down. Sitting for an August 26 interview with radio host Glenn Beck, he described the trip as semi-routine and rejected suggestions that it involved either a NATO threat or Iran sanctions. Ending the war in Ukraine was where he steered the discussion instead, remarking that Ratcliffe’s visit might yield something.
Moscow Brushes Off the Reports
“A lot of such scare stories are being published right now,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at his daily briefing on Thursday, August 27. The accounts bear no relation to reality, he added, and an aggressive policy from European countries is aimed at Russia. Ratcliffe met Russian intelligence officials but did not see Putin, he said. Turning to the war, Peskov said Moscow would prefer to achieve its aims peacefully but, absent that option, is pressing on with what it calls its special military operation. Ukrainian calls for direct talks between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have been repeatedly rebuffed by Russia, which demands instead that Kyiv withdraw from the eastern Donbas region.
Sergei Naryshkin, Russia’s foreign intelligence chief, confirmed the meeting in remarks carried by state media. Nothing unusual had taken place, he said, and what the two men went over fell within the remit of intelligence services — a subject he called delicate and special.
Washington’s alarm is not shared by Europe’s spy services. No risk of a Russian attack on European NATO countries is what European agencies see, according to a senior European Union official who spoke on condition of anonymity, and that assessment has not shifted.
The War Grinds On
Whatever the intelligence chiefs said to each other, the fighting never let up. Missiles and drones pounded Ukrainian cities overnight into Thursday, August 27, and explosions rolled across Kyiv through the morning. Nine Ukrainian cities were hit in what the Russian Defense Ministry described as a massive strike, launched after nightfall on Wednesday, August 26. The targets, the ministry said, were war-related sites: industry, oil refineries, logistics hubs and port infrastructure. Three major distribution centers were also struck by drones, which destroyed storage facilities operated by a toy retailer and a candy maker and damaged one run by an electronics retailer.
Four and a half years into the full-scale invasion, Ukraine is still desperately short of US-made Patriot interceptors capable of knocking down Russian ballistic missiles. Zelenskyy said on Friday, August 28, that Ukrainian forces hit a Russian Tu-95MS missile carrier at the Engels base, crediting the operation to the Alpha unit of Ukraine’s SBU domestic security service. Farther south, Kherson regional Governor Oleksandr Prokudin urged residents to get out — especially families with children and the elderly — saying attacks on critical infrastructure are intensifying by the day.
Alaska was the site of the last meeting between Trump and Putin, on August 15, 2025, and their most recent known phone call came in June 2026.
Ratcliffe ranks among the most senior American officials to set foot in Russia since the invasion began in 2022, and he is the first senior Trump administration official to travel to Moscow in months.