WASHINGTON -- A week after CIA Director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced trip to Moscow, questions remain over what prompted the unusual mission and what Washington believes Russia may be preparing to do.

Ratcliffe reportedly warned Russian officials against attacking or testing NATO, with particular concern about the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. He also reportedly discussed Russia's support for Iran. US President Donald Trump described the visit as "semi-routine," saying Washington wanted to see the war in Ukraine end, and that "something may come" from it.

The CIA has not publicly disclosed the full agenda. The Kremlin said Ratcliffe did not meet with President Vladimir Putin, describing the trip as part of continuing contacts between the two countries' security services.

US officials have briefed NATO allies about concerns over Russia's potential behavior, while Ukraine has said it was briefed before and after Ratcliffe's trip.

Ratcliffe's visit was the first publicly known trip to Moscow by a serving CIA director since William Burns traveled there in November 2021, months before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The comparison raises an obvious question: How serious does intelligence have to be for a CIA director to personally travel to Moscow to deliver a warning?

For Edward Bogan, a retired CIA operations officer with 24 years of national-security experience, the intelligence did not necessarily have to amount to a highest-confidence assessment. But the decision to send the CIA director suggests Washington considered the threat credible and important enough to warrant a face-to-face warning.

"The fact that a director would get on a plane and come over suggests to me that it was a credible threat, and that it was important to say face to face, you know, don't do this, irrespective of what we know," Bogan told RFE/RL.

That does not mean US intelligence has concluded Russia has decided to attack a NATO member or that an attack is imminent. But it suggests Washington saw enough potential risk to communicate directly with Moscow.

A Warning -- And Deterrence

The reported focus on the Baltics is significant. All three countries are NATO members and former Soviet republics, and all three share borders with Russia.

The concern may not be that Moscow is preparing for a major war with NATO. A more limited military action or hybrid operation could instead test whether the alliance would respond collectively and whether Moscow could exploit divisions among its members.

Russia has repeatedly denied plans to attack NATO and dismissed such assessments as "nonsense." Moscow also denied planning to invade Ukraine before launching its full-scale war in February 2022.

For Sean Wiswesser, a former CIA chief of station who wrote a book about Russian intelligence tactics, Ratcliffe's visit was "an encouraging sign" and showed that Washington was prepared to push back against what he called "the reckless escalation by Russia's intelligence services."

But he said a warning would have limited value without a threat of consequences if Moscow ignored it.

"They won't stop till we stop them," Wiswesser told RFE/RL. "But for any warning to be effective, it needs to come with consequences for Russia if they fail to heed the warning and cross more alleged red lines."

His assessment of the broader deterrence problem was stark: "So far it has been only unchecked escalation from Russia and failed deterrence from the alliance," he said, referring to NATO.

The question, then, is not simply what Washington told Moscow, but whether Russia believes the United States and its allies are prepared to act if the warning is ignored.

Bogan urged caution in assessing Russia's ability to escalate militarily. "Russia speaks like it has a lot more options than it actually does," he said.

Russia has substantial military capabilities, but its forces are bogged down in a war in Ukraine that has lasted far longer than the Kremlin had anticipated.

Bogan said observers sometimes imagine Russia as having a large unused military reserve that could suddenly be turned against Europe. "If they had such a capability, they would be applying it to the Ukraine fight," he said.

That does not mean Russia lacks options. Bogan said the intelligence behind Ratcliffe's visit could involve an effort to change the military calculus around NATO. "Something's up," he said. "Changing the calculus, coming into NATO spaces in some military manner could very well be what it...was about."

At the same time, Bogan said he did not believe Moscow necessarily wanted a direct confrontation with NATO. "I don't think they're prepared to be able to do that," he said.

A CIA Channel

Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State and a former CIA and Department of Homeland Security intelligence officer, said using the CIA to communicate with adversaries can be appropriate when sensitive issues require a discreet channel and conventional diplomacy is inadequate.

But he questioned whether Ratcliffe was carrying a coherent US policy message to Moscow.

Cash cited what he called the "apparent disjointedness of American policy" and noted the absence of Secretary of State Marco Rubio from the publicly known diplomacy surrounding the visit.

"What policy was Director Ratcliffe actually carrying to Moscow?" Cash asked.

He said the broader concern was whether the administration had an orderly, intelligence-informed process for developing policy.

"The appearance is not of the United States government speaking through a carefully considered national policy but of one would-be autocrat sending an emissary to parley with the representative of another autocrat," Cash said.

A discreet channel, Cash argued, is useful only if the policy behind the message is coherent and strategically sound.

"If the substance has been poorly conceived -- or is at odds with what our allies, our diplomats, our military, and even other parts of our own government understand American policy to be -- then the secrecy and sensitivity of the channel do not make the communication more effective," he said.

"They simply transmit confusion more efficiently."

MYLA, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian drone struck a warehouse west of Kyiv that Ukrainian officials say was storing shells, mines and other ammunition, sparking massive explosions and fires that swept through dozens of nearby homes and buildings and killing 37 people.

The Friday night attack on the warehouse in Myla, a village in the Bucha district, was the war’s deadliest attack this year and came on the second of three days of nearly round-the-clock Russian strikes that have severely disrupted life in and around the Ukrainian capital.

Attacks on the capital and, to a lesser extent, the rest of Ukraine have been nearly constant since Thursday. Kyiv officials say Russia builds up missile stocks and launches major attacks every few days, hoping to exhaust Ukrainian defenses through the sheer weight of numbers.

The warehouse strike sparked fires that raced through homes and damaged at least 50 residential buildings, said Tymur Tkachenko, who heads the local regional military administration. He was later cited by local media as saying 34 of the people killed were residents of a care home for elderly and disabled people. More than 370 people were evacuated.

The blasts rocked Myla, causing people to frantically seek cover.

“At about 8 p.m., the drone hit a warehouse somewhere and then the detonation began,” Oleksandr Vodolaz, a village resident, told The Associated Press. “No one knew that weapons were stored there.”

Another local, Zhanna Kravchuk, said she had so many questions about what happened.

“Why are weapons like this ... in warehouses and not on the front lines where they would help?” she said.

As crews raced to get people to safety and extinguish blazes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the attack as a “terrible situation” and said it appeared to be the result of “terrible negligence on the part of those who stored explosives right next to people.”

He noted that Ukrainian law forbids the storage of ammunition close to people’s homes and said criminal proceedings had been opened.

“Those who allowed this to happen must be held accountable for their decisions,” the president said.

Kyiv investigates warehouse targeted in attack

In a social media post Saturday, Zelenskyy shed more light on the situation.

“The first strike was on an ammunition storage site that definitely shouldn’t have been there – a Defense Forces storage facility. Shells, mines, other ammunition, and drones detonated.”

Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi didn’t specify what was in the warehouse, but he referenced a July attack on the Kyiv suburb of Vyshneve that struck an ammunition depot, killing 22 people and triggering detonations and fires that tore through nearby homes.

“Unfortunately, we can already see that the terrible tragedy in Vyshneve did not become a lesson,” Koretskyi said. “In the fifth year of a full-scale invasion, making the same mistakes is criminal negligence. And all those guilty, without exception, must be severely punished so that such situations do not happen again.”

The 37 killed surpassed the 31 who died in a July 2 strike on Kyiv, which had been the war’s deadliest attack of 2026.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it hit a warehouse in Myla that was storing components and launch boosters for long-range drones. It also said it attacked the ports of Mykolaiv and Izmail, and a logistics center and warehouse facilities storing parts for Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missiles in the Kyiv region.

Russian jet-powered drones pose a problem for Kyiv

Russian strikes damaged homes and apartment blocks in the southern Kherson region on Saturday, killing two people and wounding 27 more, including a child, Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the region administration, said in a statement.

Prokudin said earlier in the week that Russia had intensified its attacks on critical infrastructure in the region, which is about 70% under Russian control. He also urged tens of thousands of residents to move to safer regions because of the possibility of prolonged power and heating outages this winter.

Although officials haven’t said whether they were used in the warehouse attack, Russia has significantly increased its use of jet-powered drones, and their numbers will keep growing as Moscow sees their effectiveness, Pavlo Palisa, deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, told reporters Friday.

“Means of attack always outpace means of defense. We will certainly need to adapt. It will take time,” Palisa said. He said interceptor drones currently available to Ukraine, which could theoretically intercept jet-powered drones, have not yet demonstrated the expected effectiveness, though Ukraine is working on solutions.

Ukraine vows to increase long-range strikes

Meanwhile, Ukraine has stepped up its long-range attacks on Russian military industries and energy facilities in recent months. The attacks, which use domestically made drones, are meant to cut into a source of Moscow’s war funding and make Russians feel the consequences.

In his evening statement to the nation Friday, Zelenskyy said Kyiv hoped to increase its long-range strikes to reach 1000 drone launches every day.

“Right now, we average over 300 of our long-range sanctions,” Zelenskyy said, his preferred term for Kyiv’s long-range attacks that have also lately targeted Russian large-scale online retailers. “There must be more. We have a very specific goal, and we will achieve it.”

Moscow’s forces destroyed 313 Ukrainian drones overnight, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Saturday.

Ukrainian drone attacks wounded 11 people in Russia’s Rostov region, Gov. Yuri Slyusar said. Writing on social media, he said that nine people were hospitalized, including four children.

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This story was updated to correct that 31 people, not 30, were killed in the July 2 attack on Kyiv.

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Davies reported from Manchester, England, and Yurchuk from Kyiv. Associated Press reporter Ignatius Ivlev-Yorke contributed to this report.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia launched a large aerial assault in and around Ukraine’s capital overnight into Tuesday morning, killing at least 12 people and wounding more than a dozen others, including three children, local authorities said.

The strikes marked the sixth straight day of heavy Russian attacks on Kyiv that began last week and are an unprecedented stretch of consecutive aerial assaults since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor more than 4½ years ago. Moscow’s aim is to grind down civilians by disrupting their daily life, Ukrainian officials say.

Several million Ukrainian schoolchildren returned to classes Tuesday for the new school year, just as Russia unleashed its onslaught of cruise and ballistic missiles, jet-powered drones, glide bombs and artillery salvos at Kyiv as well as eight other regions of Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that 12 people were killed, including an Indian citizen.

The attack struck civilian infrastructure and residential buildings in several districts of Kyiv, authorities said, with eight people killed in the city itself and three others in the surrounding region.

Six employees of state-owned railway company Ukrzaliznytsia were among those killed in Kyiv when a ballistic missile hit a depot and other premises, company chairman Oleksandr Pertsovskyi said in a social media post.

Nearly 350 emergency workers were deployed in Kyiv and the surrounding region, Zelenskyy said.

The Russian Defense Ministry said that its forces carried out a “massive strike” on Ukraine overnight with “precision-guided weapons” and long-range drones. The assault targeted facilities manufacturing and storing weapons as well as military-related infrastructure, it said.

Ukraine’s air force said that Russia began the attack at 6 p.m. Monday, using ballistic, cruise and anti-radar missiles, as well as 218 drones and decoys. About a third of the drones were jet-powered, which are much harder to intercept than the propeller-driven version.

The main Russian targets were in the Kyiv and southern Odesa regions, the air force said in a statement.

The attack on the Odesa region, located on the Black Sea, damaged civilian infrastructure and wounded one person, regional head Oleh Kiper said.

Two residential buildings were damaged, while a fire broke out at a textile factory. Russian forces also struck the Orlivka international ferry crossing on the border with Romania, he said.

Russia also shelled the northern Zhytomyr region, starting fires at an industrial facility and a warehouse, Ukraine’s Emergency Service said.

In the capital, first responders worked to clear rubble from damaged apartment buildings and free trapped residents.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday that its air defenses overnight intercepted 516 Ukrainian drones over 18 Russian regions, as well as the illegally annexed Crimean Peninsula and the Black Sea.

In the Leningrad region, the drone attack sparked a fire in the port of Ust-Luga, Gov. Alexander Drozdenko said, as Ukraine extended its campaign to hurt Russia’s oil sector, which is a mainstay of the economy.

Ust-Luga is one of Russia’s largest oil and gas export terminals more than 800 kilometers (500 miles) away from Ukraine. It has been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian drone attacks this year.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Russia Torments Kyiv With New Tactic of Nonstop Waves of Drones

The nearly constant air raids, a shift from years of largely overnight attacks, have left residents exhausted and on edge.

As the war against Ukraine drags on, the Kremlin has found it necessary to adopt a more aggressive strategy to control both potential opponents and ordinary Russians. But governing through spy hunts and paranoia carries serious consequences.

Foreign Affairs examines how Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s paranoia is paralyzing Russia.

The article’s authors note that since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has steadily tightened its control over Russian society. For Russians, the new measures stand in sharp contrast to the limited freedoms they had before February 2022.

Less obvious, however, is a fundamental shift in Russia’s domestic security doctrine, Foreign Affairs writes. The Federal Security Service, or FSB, is now focused on hunting spies. Using tactics tested during the Soviet era, it has carried out a campaign to root out any threats to the regime. This has allowed the FSB to extend its reach deeper into society, private companies and government institutions.

But governing through spy hunts and paranoia carries significant costs, the authors argue.

Government agencies and private businesses, fearing FSB repression, conceal accurate data, avoid making decisions and increasingly operate in survival mode. Among ordinary Russians and civil servants, tighter social controls and treason prosecutions have created a pervasive atmosphere of distrust and deepened the sense of paralysis.

Ultimately, the Kremlin’s ability to govern the country could be undermined, the authors believe.

In seeking to turn any perceived political threat into a potential act of treason, Moscow relies not on legal standards but on secret FSB assessments. Against that backdrop, Russian officials, members of the elite and private organizations are increasingly reluctant to disclose information about facts or developments that could prove politically unpopular.

The situation is further complicated by Russian industry’s ties to the military, Foreign Affairs notes. Private companies involved in military projects are subject to counterintelligence scrutiny. Cost overruns or delays can bring the threat of treason charges.

Russian research institutions are also reluctant to share information. Even innocuous data, such as technical findings, research results or statistics, are now treated as potential security threats.

Strict oversight by the security services has also sharply restricted the publication of even routine statistics.

The Kremlin has achieved its immediate political goals, but at a high cost. Officials fail to report problems before they grow into crises. Regional authorities avoid taking initiative until they receive direct orders. Researchers, statistical agencies and businesses withhold information that could be useful to the authorities. Civil servants across government delay effective decisions while waiting for instructions “from above,” the publication writes.

For the Kremlin, the risk of elite paralysis is real and is spreading among senior officials and managers both in Moscow and the regions. By dismantling channels of feedback, Putin’s regime is becoming increasingly unable to understand the true state of affairs in the country, the authors conclude. Over the long term, that could leave Putin significantly more vulnerable to a serious political crisis.

On Aug. 7, Bloomberg reported that concern was growing among members of Russia’s elite that the FSB had spun out of control, as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin relies on the agency to preserve his rule.

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