The director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Ratcliffe, made a secret trip to Moscow on Tuesday (25) to warn the Kremlin against any attack on countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the US-led military alliance. The information was published by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday (26), based on unidentified sources, and was picked up by the Brazilian press. The Kremlin rejected the reports, dismissing them as "alarmist stories".
According to Folha de S.Paulo, Ratcliffe spent about nine hours in the Russian capital, flying in on a military cargo plane with an undisclosed itinerary, and the visit was only confirmed the following day. On the agenda was a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Naryshkin, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). According to VEJA magazine, it was the first visit by a CIA director to Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine, which gives the trip weight even as both governments try to play it down in public.
For Brazil, the episode matters for two concrete reasons. The first is economic: an escalation between Russia and NATO would pressure grain and fertilizer markets, and Russia is one of the main fertilizer suppliers to Brazilian agribusiness. The second is diplomatic: Brazil's foreign ministry has kept a neutral stance on the Ukraine war and pushes for negotiation, and any direct clash between Moscow and the Western alliance would shrink even further the room for that middle-ground position.
What each side wants
On the American side, the trip was driven by intelligence assessments that Vladimir Putin could "test" the alliance, probing how far NATO countries would go in responding to aggression. The concern centers on the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the bloc's most exposed members. According to VEJA, Ratcliffe also pressed Moscow to cut military and economic support to Iran, asking for an end to arms and defense technology supplies to Tehran and urging the Kremlin not to react disproportionately if hit by US sanctions tied to the Islamic republic. President Donald Trump, however, downplayed the trip, calling it "semi-routine" and saying Putin "is not going to attack NATO", according to G1 and O GLOBO.
Russia, in turn, denies any attack plan and uses the word "alarmist" to describe the reporting, a stance that preserves the strategic ambiguity Moscow has cultivated since 2022. The Baltic states, which frequently report fears of this kind, come out strengthened by seeing Washington address the risk at the highest level of espionage.
There is disagreement over the tone of the meeting. Folha heard from a person with knowledge of the matter in Moscow that the two spy chiefs exchanged impressions and warnings, but in a milder tone than the Wall Street Journal suggested. The São Paulo newspaper also lays out the context of the American concern: the stalemate in the Ukraine war, Ukrainian strikes that triggered a fuel and logistics crisis inside Russia and American exhaustion from the confrontation with Iran would, in Washington's reading, create a window of risk. The direct channel between the CIA and the SVR is one of the few lines of communication still open between the two powers, and the trip suggests that, away from the spotlight, deterrence is still being conducted quietly.