CIA directors do not fly to Moscow for a ceremonial coffee. When it happens, it usually means something else has already stopped working.

John Ratcliffe, director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, was in Moscow on Tuesday. The visit was not announced. According to American media citing unnamed sources, he warned Russia against attacking NATO allies and asked the Kremlin to scale back its military and financial support for Iran.

Secrecy that is itself the message

How the visit was organised says as much as what was said in it. Western media reported that a military aircraft took off from Riga. Kyiv was reportedly asked to temporarily halt drone strikes on Moscow and other Russian regions so the American delegation could pass safely.

Stop on that sentence. Ukraine, in the middle of a war, receives a request not to strike for a few hours so the head of the CIA can land in the enemy's capital. That is not a diplomatic detail; it is a picture of who defers to whom, and how much, in this war.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Ratcliffe had come for talks "between the security services", and stressed that Vladimir Putin did not meet the American official. That "did not meet" is carefully placed - Moscow wants to show it was not the one asking.

The last time this happened, a war followed

This is almost certainly Ratcliffe's first trip to Moscow in this post. The previous time a CIA director went there was 2021, when William Burns met Putin. The then US president Joe Biden sent him with the task of preventing escalation over Ukraine. We know how that ended.

That does not mean history repeats automatically. It means the context in which such a man is dispatched is recognisable: when the regular diplomatic channels are blocked, you send the intelligence chief - because he can say things an ambassador cannot, and hear things a minister will never admit.

The Baltic, Iran and the hybrid front

According to Politico, the warning concerned possible escalation involving NATO's Baltic member states. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, published intelligence assessments that Russia is preparing new waves of mobilisation and testing NATO's boundaries through hybrid operations across Europe.

On the same day, Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican's Secretary for Relations with States, also arrived in Moscow for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The Vatican offered the Holy See's readiness to mediate for peace in Ukraine. When Washington sends a spy chief and the Vatican sends a diplomat, in the same week, to the same city, that is not a scheduling coincidence.

Macedonia is a NATO member. Testing the Alliance's boundaries through hybrid operations is not an abstraction from a report; it is a category that includes cyber attacks, disinformation and pressure on energy infrastructure. Do our institutions follow these assessments with the same seriousness as the allies who produce them - or are we waiting for someone to translate them for us once it is already late?