Already a subscriber? Make sure to log into your account before viewing this content. You can access your account by hitting the “login” button on the top right corner. Still unable to see the content after signing in? Make sure your card on file is up-to-date.

According to new reports, CIA Director Ratcliffe’s visit to Russia was meant to warn Moscow against attacking NATO territory amid intelligence assessments that Putin may try to test the alliance with a limited attack on a member state.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: Ratcliffe flew in Tuesday on a C-17A Globemaster that left Joint Base Andrews Sunday evening, staged in Riga, and landed at Vnukovo Airport outside Moscow. He was on the ground for roughly eight hours, and no CIA director had set foot in Moscow since William Burns showed up in November 2021 to warn Putin off invading Ukraine. The invasion started three months later. The US asked Ukraine to hold off on drone and missile strikes against Moscow and northern Russia ahead of the visit, telling Kyiv a senior American official would be in Russia.

What’s going on now: First reported by The Wall Street Journal, the NATO warning was the core of the trip. Politico reported that Ratcliffe specifically told Russian officials not to escalate against Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and separately leaned on the Kremlin to pull back the weapons and money it sends Iran while the administration keeps tightening the financial screws on Tehran.

The intelligence behind the warning lays out a menu of options Russia could pick from, anything from a cyberattack to a small ground push meant to test whether Article 5 actually holds while staying limited enough that the alliance might not answer it. The Baltics and Poland are the likeliest targets, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Russian drones violated Polish airspace last September and were shot down by NATO jets. Earlier this month, the US assessed that an explosive-laden drone found near a Ukrainian transport plane in Germany belonged to a Russian intelligence service.

The New York Times reported the other half of the message. Ratcliffe went straight to Aleksandr Bortnikov, who runs the FSB, and told him Russia’s military and its economy will only get worse from here if the Kremlin keeps stalling on real peace talks. The agency has spent years unsure whether anyone around Putin tells him the truth about how the war is actually going, and the bet was that a spy chief delivering that news would land harder with a former KGB man than the same message from a diplomat. Ratcliffe said publicly last month that the life expectancy of a Russian soldier at the front is “less than 35 minutes.”

This all comes as Trump downplayed the meeting, saying, “He’s there, you know, very sort of semi-routine. I hate to disappoint people. We would like to see the war with Ukraine end.”