President Donald Trump said John Ratcliffe's trip to Russia was a "semi-routine" visit but there is nothing routine about the CIA chief making a secret, 10,000-mile return dash to Moscow. Ratcliffe met Russian intelligence officials on Tuesday - notably his opposite number in Russia's overseas spy agency, Sergei Naryshkin - after arriving unannounced on a US military plane, the Kremlin confirmed. It's been nearly five years since his predecessor William Burns made this trip and that was at a similarly tense time, just as Russia was drawing up plans to invade Ukraine.
So, this is probably serious. In the absence of any official US comment on the reason for the mission, it is being widely reported Ratcliffe's trip was to warn Moscow not to escalate in relation to the stalemate in Ukraine - possibly by taking action against Nato members. One US official told Politico that the "meeting was primarily to warn Russia against any escalatory action against the Baltic states".
The UK is also in Russian crosshairs. On Thursday, a foreign ministry spokeswoman said Russia could strike British military targets as retaliation for Ukrainian strikes on Russia using British missiles. And a drone carrying an explosive which was discovered at an airport in the German city of Leipzig was probably Russian, security experts have said.
News of Ratcliffe's visit follows reports of US intelligence assessments that President Vladimir Putin was planning a limited assault on a Nato ally. But you don't need the world's most powerful electronic eavesdropping organisation – the US National Security Agency – to know that Putin is under mounting domestic pressure to "do something" to break the deadlock. Ukraine's deep strikes with long-range drones have not only hammered Russia's energy industry, they have brought the war home to ordinary Russians.
Nothing says things are not going to plan more than long queues for petrol and billowing smoke coming from stricken oil refineries. The Kremlin sees these attacks as Nato fighting an indirect war on Russia by using Ukraine as a proxy. So how will Russia respond?
There is a broad spectrum of possibilities here. These include stepping up the ballistic missile attacks on Ukraine that Moscow is already launching, including targeting the centre of Kyiv, knowing that Ukraine is running dangerously low on Patriot interceptors to stop them. UK drone factories may face attacks from 'unknown sources', says former Russian minister Rosenberg: Shortage of petrol but not patriotism as Russians feel growing impact of war It could entail expanding the undeclared "hybrid war" that Russia is already suspected of waging against Nato countries, using sophisticated cyber-attacks, drone incursions and using not-so-sophisticated criminals to carry out arson attacks on munitions factories.
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