CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow to meet with Russian intelligence officials, the Kremlin reportedly said Wednesday, after video emerged of a U.S. military transport plane coming in for a landing Tuesday at Vnukovo airport.
President Donald Trump, when asked this morning about Ratcliffe’s visit on “The Glenn Beck Program,” said, “He’s there on, you know, very sort of semi-routine.”
“We would like to see the war with Ukraine end,” Trump added, before saying, “Now something may come out of it.
“We’re working very hard to get that war ended and frankly they both want to see it ended at this point.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House, the CIA and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow for further comment.
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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday, according to Reuters, “All I can tell you is that there have been contacts via the security services. I can tell you that there have been no meetings with the Russian president.”
The news agency cited the Kremlin as saying Ratcliffe met with Russian intelligence officials.
“Naturally, President Putin is kept informed of everything without delay,” Peskov also was quoted as saying.
The last CIA director to visit Moscow was William Burns in November 2021, three months before Russia’s war against Ukraine started, Reuters reported.
A senior Ukrainian official told The Associated Press that Washington informed Kyiv a delegation would be traveling to the Russian capital and asked it to suspend strikes until it left.
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The official said the request did not apply to all Russian territory, but specifically to Moscow, St. Petersburg and some northern regions. Strikes on other parts of Russia continued, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk publicly.
Video captured a U.S. military transport plane coming in for a landing Tuesday at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, in a flight that the Kremlin initially claimed it had no information about.
Data from the website Flightradar24 showed that the Boeing C-17A Globemaster III left Joint Base Andrews in Maryland early Sunday afternoon on a flight to Riga, Latvia. The aircraft then traveled from Riga to Moscow on Tuesday morning.
The last time a U.S.-registered jet made a direct flight to Russia from Europe was in January when special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, visited Moscow for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine, according to Reuters.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
