An American C-17 military transport aircraft landed in Moscow, via Riga. The Kremlin said it has no information about the plane and that no meetings with representatives of the American administration were scheduled that week. Both claims cannot be true at once.

According to journalist Michael Weiss, CIA director John Ratcliffe was on the plane, and the purpose of the visit may be to head off Russian military operations against European NATO members. There is no official confirmation - which is to be expected, since trips like this are not announced while they are happening.

What gives the story weight is the context around it. The timing coincides with intensified intelligence sharing between the US and Poland, the Baltic states and the Scandinavian countries, against a backdrop of increasingly frequent suspected sabotage operations and drone activity. When intelligence services start talking directly, it usually means diplomatic channels are no longer enough.

Among the possible topics mentioned are a global moratorium on strikes against energy and port infrastructure in Russia and Ukraine, and a ceasefire in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions as a first step toward de-escalation. None of that is a peace agreement. Those are technical arrangements about what will not be hit - the most modest possible form of conversation between states at war.

The channel that works when everything else goes quiet

The difference between an intelligence and a diplomatic channel is precisely that the first requires nobody to lose face. No joint photograph, no statement, no press conference where someone has to explain why they are sitting across from an adversary. If the conversation fails, formally it never happened.

That is why the visit is worth more than many official statements about peace from recent months. Nobody sends a CIA director on a military aircraft to deliver something an ambassador could say.

The differences remain where they were - territory, security guarantees and the status of Ukraine. No intelligence channel resolves those questions. But channels exist so that talks do not break off entirely, and that is exactly what happened this week - while, in parallel, reports emerged of a possible new Russian mobilisation.