On 25 August, CIA Director John Ratcliffe held a secret meeting in Moscow, where he met with Russian foreign intelligence chief Sergey Naryshkin and domestic intelligence director Alexander Bortnikov. Russian President Vladimir Putin did not attend the meeting.
“The visit was extraordinary,” Dr Kristi Raik, the Director of Estonia's International Centre for Defence and Security, told The European Correspondent. “For the CIA to personally go to Moscow, it's rare.”
The last time a CIA director flew to Moscow was in November 2021, and three months later, Russia began its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“When you want to signal you're serious, you send the CIA director,” David Gioe, former CIA case officer turned intelligence historian, told us.
The Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, spoke with people briefed on the discussion who said the impromptu meeting was meant to deter Russia from embarking on an attack on NATO via the Baltic states. Later, reporting by the Washington Post said the meeting came after the US received new intelligence of a more urgent risk of Russian escalation.
“In the intelligence world, you need to steal a secret in order to have some sort of assessment based on secret intelligence,” Gioe told us on how to interpret these intelligence findings. “Otherwise you're reading the same tea leaves that everyone else is reading.”
Reading these tea leaves isn't too difficult, given the threat already out in the open. “Russian provocation against NATO is something that has been happening already,” Raik said. “Russia is probing all the time to try and find the weak spots in European societies and in the infrastructure, among other sectors.”
Two days later after the Moscow meeting on 27 August, the Under Secretary of War for Policy, Elbridge Colby – the third highest ranking US defence official – went to Brussels and briefed NATO ambassadors and Secretary Mark Rutte, which informed Rutte's later conversation with Tusk.
A few hot weeks
The development comes after a sharp few weeks of Russian escalation. Just a few weeks ago US intelligence warned of Russia planning an attack on NATO’s Eastern Flank sometime in the next few years. An armed drone also attempted to detonate at the German Leipzig/Halle airport, and was attributed to Russia according to US intelligence, with Germany set to recognise Russia as behind the attack.
“The risk-taking on the Russian side has increased, because Russia is in an increasingly desperate situation in Ukraine,” Raik said.
NATO has also picked up activity in the region with aircraft entering into an exercise for deterrence near Kaliningrad these last few weeks.
The concern has become so tangible that five EU Commissioners from Eastern Flank states have also asked Commission President von der Leyen to appoint a high-level coordinator for Baltic security who would work with NATO and national authorities to prepare for potential critical infrastructure threats.
Undefined red-lines
That is the most likely concern according to most experts. “There are no signs that Russia is preparing for a military invasion in any NATO country,” Raik said. “But they will probably be looking for other ways to conduct sabotage acts or other actions that would then cause damage to a NATO country to maybe make them less willing to support Ukraine,” Raik told us.
Russia opts for acts like sabotage as it operates inside a grey zone that is equally challenging for decision makers to respond to, as it is dangerous in its unpredictability. It does so due to a gap in NATO's founding Atlantic Charter.
Article 4 lets any member call the alliance to the table for consultations when it feels threatened, but no follow up action is mandated. The next stage up, is Article 5 - the collective-defence clause - which treats an armed attack on one NATO member as an attack on all. But what defines an armed attack? That is the wide, undefined grey zone that is unclear and where Russia operates.
“Putin doesn't know NATO's real red-lines because NATO itself hasn't worked it out yet,” Gioe said. Should Russia stumble into an unclear NATO red-line, Article 5 means we are all at war.
“The longer European leaders turn the other cheek or turn a blind eye, all they're doing is signaling to Putin that their red-lines are still some ways and this tells Putin that he has still more runway for his sub-threshold attacks before triggering an unequivocal collective conventional response, which is what Putin wants to avoid,” Gioe said.
Russia's foreign policy is almost like gas according to Gioe. “It expands to the space that it's permitted, and in that space, Putin will do whatever he wants.”
Part of the Moscow trip seems to be a US attempt to walk Russia down off of potential threats as the war in Ukraine lingers on indefinitely to clarify such space. CIA Director Ratcliffe proposed a trilateral meeting between US President Trump, Russian President Putin and Ukrainian President Zelensky, sources familiar with the meeting told Axios. Though the White House's strategy or incentive behind such a proposal is not known.
In the immediate term, this leaves Europe in an uncomfortable spot. Our politicians have not defined the red-lines, therefore we as European citizens and residents have to expect a range of escalation that could very well impact our everyday lives.
This could look like anything from a Russian backed mass terrorist attacks like the one nearly carried out in Germany, to a mass cyber attack, or infrastructure sabotage.
Raik framed Russia as an adversary that is hard to read through our Western lens. “There is a certain rationality in Russia's foreign policy. It's just that it's maybe not the rationality that European countries or Western countries would expect,” she said.
Raik's example for Russia's irrationality is Ukraine which she asserts has been “irrational if you think about it in terms of what it costs and what the likelihood of success is.” For Putin, “Ukraine has become like an obsession. Obsession is not, of course, very rational.”
The question that persists is what is Ukraine-obsessed Russia willing to do to get unstuck in a war that, for now, it can’t win?