The government of Vladimir Putin tested on Friday (28) an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads, three days after a rare and secretive visit to Moscow by the director of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), John Ratcliffe. According to Folha de S.Paulo, the Yars missile was launched from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk region of northwestern Russia, in footage released by the Russian Defense Ministry.
Ratcliffe's trip, made on Tuesday (25), was confirmed by the Kremlin the following day. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the American met with intelligence officials, including the head of the SVR (Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service), Sergei Naryshkin, but did not see Putin, who was informed of everything, the Associated Press reported. Peskov described relations between the two countries as being in a "profound crisis" and refused to detail the agenda. U.S. President Donald Trump played down the visit, calling it "sort of semi-routine" on a conservative radio show.
For Brazil, the episode matters on two levels. Diplomatically, the country is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and Itamaraty, Brazil's foreign ministry, has advocated since 2022 a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, a position that becomes harder to sustain with each show of atomic force. Economically, any escalation between Russia and the West tends to pressure fertilizer and grain markets, on which Brazilian agribusiness depends heavily.
What each side wants
The immediate tension has an address: London. On Monday (24), British Prime Minister Andy Burnham stood beside President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv for Ukraine's Independence Day and promised to ease the transfer of technology so Ukraine can produce Storm Shadow cruise missiles, a model the United Kingdom and France have already supplied to Kyiv, Folha reported. The announcement followed a British sale of short-range attack drones to the Ukrainians. In response, the Kremlin said it now considers British defense industries, inside or outside Ukraine, legitimate targets. For Moscow, the Yars test works as a message to NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization); on the Western side, Washington keeps a direct channel to Moscow open while Europeans expand military support to Kyiv.
That channel came with a practical cost: a senior Ukrainian official told the Associated Press that Washington informed Kyiv about the delegation and asked it to suspend strikes on Moscow, St. Petersburg and some northern Russian regions until the Americans departed. Long-range strikes on other areas continued.
The test comes as peace efforts are largely stalled. Putin rejected Zelensky's push for an immediate ceasefire and insists on a comprehensive settlement, while Russians and Ukrainians intensify long-range attacks on each other. With American attention divided by the war against Iran, a conflict in which Moscow has offered to mediate, gestures like Friday's launch read more as signaling than as preparation for actual use of the weapon. Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia's security services, told AP that visits like Ratcliffe's do not "happen every year" and usually occur when there is a pressing national security matter. In 2022, then-CIA director William Burns met Naryshkin in Turkey precisely to warn Moscow against deploying nuclear weapons in Ukraine.