CIA Director John Ratcliffe reportedly made a secret trip to Moscow on Tuesday, marking the highest-level visit by a Trump administration official to Russia since January, even as the Kremlin said no such meeting was taking place.

CBS News and Axios both reported Ratcliffe’s presence in the Russian capital, citing sources familiar with the matter. Neither outlet identified whom he met or what was discussed. Ratcliffe previously served as director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term before being sworn in as CIA director in January 2025.

According to Al Jazeera, flight-tracking data showed a U.S. military C-17 departing Riga, Latvia, early Tuesday morning and landing in Moscow about 74 minutes later before leaving again later in the day.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that any such meeting or talks were planned. Asked about the reports, he said, "No, there are no such plans." When pressed specifically about the reported landing of the U.S. military plane in Moscow, Peskov said he had "no such information."

Axios reported that Washington gave Ukraine advance notice of the senior delegation’s trip and asked Kyiv to hold off on strikes until the group had left Russian territory.

The reported visit comes as U.S.-brokered talks aimed at ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine remain stalled. A February 2025 meeting in Riyadh between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was the highest-level in-person U.S.-Russia contact since the invasion began, but neither those talks nor President Trump’s mid-August summit with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, has produced a ceasefire. Earlier this month, Moscow freed a former U.S. Marine who had been detained since 2022, reportedly because of health concerns.

Prisoner exchanges have been one of the few areas of functioning cooperation between Washington and Moscow since the war began, ranging from the August 2024 swap at Ankara’s airport — the largest East-West exchange since the Cold War, which freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former Marine Paul Whelan — to the release of American teacher Marc Fogel in February 2025. Ratcliffe has played a quiet but central role in several high-profile prisoner swaps between Washington and Moscow since President Trump returned to office in January 2025, including the release of dual national Ksenia Karelina last year. If confirmed, the trip would be the first by a sitting CIA director to Moscow since William Burns traveled there in November 2021, when the former U.S. ambassador to Russia delivered warnings about the consequences of a full-scale invasion. Burns also met Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, in Ankara in November 2022 in a session U.S. officials described as a warning against nuclear escalation.

The CIA declined to comment on the reports.