A day of mystery, silences, hopes, and speculations this Tuesday in Moscow. It all began when the specialized website Flightradar24 reported the landing of a U.S. military plane at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport. As mediators from Donald Trump have been expected for weeks to resume the stalled search for solutions to the war in Ukraine, speculations quickly arose. But a few hours later, American media CBS and Axios claimed that none other than the head of U.S. espionage, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, had flown to the Russian capital to attend meetings with Russian authorities in Moscow. Neither the United States nor Russia has officially confirmed this trip.
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The U.S. plane, a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III military transport, arrived in Moscow from Riga shortly after ten in the morning, according to data from the air traffic tracking platform Flightradar24. It had arrived in the Latvian capital two days earlier from Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, used for the travel of high-ranking American government officials.
From this base, near the city of Camp Springs in the state of Maryland, the Air Force One, the U.S. president’s plane, also usually takes off.
Prisoner exchanges, possible reason for the trip
Another U.S. Air Force plane, a Gulfstream C-37B, landed at Vnukovo in February 2025. It had also departed from Andrews and carried the Russian Alexander Vinnik, released from a U.S. prison after the governments of both countries agreed to exchange him for the American teacher Marc Fogel.
For this reason, Boris Rozhin, an expert at the Center for Political-Military Journalism, suggested in a Telegram comment that the mysterious trip was related to the recent release of former U.S. Marine Robert Gilman. U.S. President Donald Trump said that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, had agreed to release the American without exchanging him for any Russian, exclusively for humanitarian reasons. Still, Rozhin speculated about the possibility that “maybe it is some kind of unannounced interaction as part of Gilman’s handover.”
Asked at his daily press conference, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov replied that he “does not have this information” and that no meeting with representatives of the American administration is planned at the Kremlin this week.
Moscow awaits the next visit of Witkoff and Kushner, Trump’s mediators for the war in Ukraine
The lack of confirmation from Moscow and Washington authorities has led public opinion in media and social networks to recall in the Russian capital that in recent weeks there have been several mentions of the possible visit of Trump’s emissaries, businessman Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, especially because both their arrival and the exact date remain uncertain.
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Since Trump began mediating to try to find a solution to the war between Russia and Ukraine, Witkoff and Kushner have traveled several times to Russia, where they met with Putin. Despite Trump’s promise to resolve the European conflict in 24 hours, the diplomatic route suddenly stalled when Washington embarked at the end of last February on the war against Iran, whose possible end also seems stalled.
To clarify the mystery, or quite the opposite, the information from CBS and Axios may contribute. According to these American media, John Ratcliffe, now CIA director and between 2020 and 2021 U.S. Director of National Intelligence, traveled to Moscow this Tuesday.
Additionally, according to the Financial Times, Washington had received guarantees from Ukraine that at the beginning of this week its drones would not attack the Russian capital or other areas of Russia, to allow the travel of a high-ranking U.S. official to the region.
It would be Ratcliffe’s first trip to the Russian capital since taking office last year as head of the U.S. espionage agency. However, the reports did not say what topics he would address in his meetings with Russian officials nor confirm if he had traveled on the military plane from Andrews with a two-day stopover in Riga.
The Boeing C-17 Globemaster III took off from Vnukovo and left Moscow a few hours before nightfall in the Russian capital. Without clarifying the mystery.
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