CIA Chief Warned Putin Russia’s Ukraine Invasion Was Going Worse Than He Realized

CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow with a direct message for Russia: reach an agreement with Ukraine before the country’s military and economic position deteriorates further.

Reports emerged Tuesday that Ratcliffe had made the undisclosed trip, after intense speculation over the unexpected landing of a U.S. military aircraft in Russia.

Current and former officials said Ratcliffe’s mission was to deliver the warning to Aleksandr Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s FSB intelligence service. However, they said he did not issue threats or outline possible consequences if Russian President Vladimir Putin chose to disregard the CIA’s assessment.

The CIA has long questioned whether Putin is receiving a full and accurate picture from his advisers about the course of the invasion and the toll it is taking on Russia.

For years, the U.S. intelligence agency has also maintained open channels of communication with both the FSB and Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR.

In a separate track, Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, have built lines of contact with several senior advisers close to Putin.

Officials told the New York Times that Putin, a former intelligence officer himself, would be more likely to take the message seriously if it came directly from the CIA director.

Before meeting Bortnikov in Moscow, Ratcliffe spoke with his Ukrainian counterparts and assured them he would not make concessions on Ukraine’s behalf.

The last year has seen Russia’s advance on Ukrainian territory grind to all but a halt. It was initially believed by many that Russia’s victory over Ukraine was inevitable. 

But Kremlin forces have suffered huge losses, with little to show for it. 

Last month, Mr Ratcliffe warned that the average life expectancy of a Russian soldier was as little as 20 minutes.  

Speaking at the Defence and Innovation Summit in Pennsylvania, the CIA’s director said: ‘That’s because AI-powered drones have gotten to be such specialised, low-cost killing machines.’

AI drones account for more than 80 per cent of destroyed Russian targets, according to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

To date, about two million soldiers have been killed, wounded or are missing since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, 1.4 million of them Russian, according to a recent estimate by the Centre for Strategic & International Studies.

Neither side releases military casualty data.

Russia’s troops have struggled to advance this year along the 745-mile front line as Ukraine’s drones counter Russia’s numerical advantage in troops. 

A drone attack early on Friday killed one man in Kherson, hours after authorities urged residents to leave as intensifying Russian attacks on the southern Ukrainian city risk cutting power supplies ahead of the long winter.

Russian forces are positioned on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River, which borders the city briefly occupied by Moscow in 2022, making it particularly vulnerable to shelling.

The drone attack early on Friday in Kherson’s Korabelnyi district killed a 61-year-old man who was taken to hospital with a ‘penetrating chest wound’, Yaroslav Shanko, the head of the Kherson city administration, said.

Three others wounded were taken to hospital in the Dniprovsky district.

The attack came after regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin on Thursday urged residents of Kherson, ‘especially families with children and elderly people,’ to ‘please leave’.

Mr Prokudin said there was an ‘extremely difficult security situation’ in the city, which had about 280,000 inhabitants before the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2022. It was occupied by Russian forces from March to November of that year.

‘The enemy is intensifying its attacks every day on the region’s critical infrastructure,’ he said, adding that on Wednesday ‘Russian forces again attacked Kherson’s district heating plant with glide bombs’.

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The facility ‘sustained very serious damage,’ he said, adding that Kherson may find itself ‘without electricity or heating not for hours or days but for a long period’.

Ukrainian stocks of interceptor missiles have also started to dwindle.

‘There is no way to destroy these types of drones or aerial bombs in any region of our country,’ he said.

Last winter, Russia repeatedly targeted Ukrainian power plants, plunging millions of people into cold and darkness.

Mr Zelensky warned earlier this month that Ukraine had ‘virtually no intact thermal power plants’.

Russia and Ukraine have for several months been ramping up their long-range strikes, increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure such as logistics warehouses and oil and port facilities.

These attacks are causing a rising number of civilian casualties.

Further from the front line, Ukraine’s capital Kyiv has been particularly targeted this summer.

On Thursday, the capital spent nearly 15 hours under air raid alert due to repeated drone attacks, according to local authorities.

This ‘shows another way Russia is using its weapons to disrupt civilian life’, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in response, warning that Moscow ‘continues to choose terror and war’.

In the face of Russian bombardments, Mr Zelensky has consistently appealed to allies for new air defence systems.

While Ukraine has in recent days received fresh promises of military aid from European countries, including France, it primarily relies on advanced US Patriot systems to protect its airspace.

Deliveries of these missiles have sharply decreased, however, as US stockpiles depleted because of the Middle East war.

Four-and-a-half years after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, negotiations, briefly undertaken with US mediation to end the conflict, are at a standstill.

Russian chief of general staff Valery Gerasimov has nonetheless visited troops fighting on the Ukrainian front to congratulate them on their ‘successes’ in the eastern Donetsk region.

During the visit he said the Russian army was now only a few kilometres from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, cities whose capture is a key objective for the Kremlin.