The Kremlin said Wednesday that CIA Director John Ratcliffe held talks in Moscow with his intelligence counterparts, a rare and secretive visit at a time when relations with Washington remain strained over Russia's war in Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Ratcliffe did not meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was informed of the contacts that were "on the intelligence agencies’ level.” “Of course, President Putin is immediately informed of everything,” Peskov added, refusing to say what was discussed. The CIA declined to comment, and there was no immediate comment from the White House. Russian state news agencies reported that a U.S. military plane landed in Moscow's Vnukovo airport on Tuesday and departed later that day. A senior Ukrainian official told The Associated Press that Washington informed Kyiv a delegation would be traveling to the Russian capital and asked it to suspend strikes until it left. The official said the request did not apply to all Russian territory, but specifically to Moscow, St. Petersburg and some northern regions. Strikes on other parts of Russia continued, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk publicly. CBS News first reported on the visit. Kremlin says US-Russia relations are in a ‘profound crisis’ Peskov said that “contacts between intelligence agencies are, in and of themselves, a positive phenomenon, a positive process,” but he stressed that Russia-U.S. relations remain in a “profound crisis.” He added that it was “too early to say” what impact Ratcliffe's visit would have on the ties between the two countries. Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services, told AP that visits like the one by Ratcliffe do not “happen every year.” Official channels of communication between Moscow and Washington have been kept alive since the 1980s and exist so both sides can talk if American or Russian lives are in danger or for other reasons, Soldatov said. In 2021, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Putin’s Security Council, met CIA Director William Burns in Moscow months before Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Burns later met Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, in Turkey in November 2022 to warn Russia not to deploy a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. Details of Tuesday’s discussions have not been revealed but such meetings normally take place only when there is a matter of pressing national security and when it is in “American national interests,” Soldatov said. Russia-U.S. relations sank to Cold War lows after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but appeared to warm after President Donald Trump returned to office. He had promised to end the war swiftly, holding multiple phone calls with Putin and even hosting him in Alaska a year ago. The efforts to negotiate a peace deal have largely stalled since then, however, with U.S. attention turning to its war with Iran and both Moscow and Kyiv stepping up their long-range attacks on each other. Putin has rejected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's push for an immediate ceasefire, arguing that Russia wants a comprehensive settlement, not a temporary truce. Russia has proposed to mediate in the U.S. and Israel's war with Iran, Moscow's important ally in the Middle East. Russia and Iran have a partnership treaty After Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, Tehran provided Russia with Shahed drones and later licensed their production in Russia. In January 2025, Moscow and Tehran signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership” treaty. But even as it has built ties with Iran, Russia also has remained friendly with Israel, and analysts have described its relations with Iran as complex and challenging. In March, AP reported that Russia provided Iran with information that could help Tehran strike American warships, aircraft and other assets in the region, according to two officials familiar with U.S. intelligence on the matter. The officials, who were not authorized to comment publicly on the sensitive matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, cautioned that the U.S. intelligence has not uncovered that Russia is directing Iran on what to do with the information. Asked at the time whether Russia would go beyond political support and offer military assistance to Iran, Peskov said there has been no such request from Tehran. Pressed on whether Moscow provided any military or intelligence assistance to Tehran since the Iran war’s start, he refrained from comment. Soldatov said it’s possible Tuesday's meeting involved discussion of protecting U.S. personnel, bases or facilities in the Middle East that have been targeted by Iran. Ratcliffe could have traveled to Moscow to try to influence this relationship, he added. —— Volodymyr Yurchuk in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Emma Burrows in London contributed.
The Kremlin said Wednesday that CIA Director John Ratcliffe held talks in Moscow with his intelligence counterparts, a rare and secretive visit at a time when relations with Washington remain strained over Russia's war in Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said …
See this event through different lenses
Compare how Western, Iranian, Israeli, Global South, and Pro-Peace perspectives frame this event.
Compare PerspectivesLoading notes...
State media reported that U.S. strikes near Tehran and in Semnan province, where ballistic missile and space programs are located, were carried out early Thursday. These incidents followed daylight attacks on Wednesday, indicating a reported increase in the frequency of strikes.
Bahrain and Kuwait say they have engaged with Iranian air strikes, while Iran says it hit a U.S. air base in Jordan.
WTI Rises After Big Product Draws, Tiny Crude Build, SPR Nears 'Tank Bottoms'
Oil prices extended their declines for a third straight day after the US plan to ramp up economic pressure on Iran spared the country’s trading partners from harsher measures for now, while mediators said they were continuing efforts to end the conflict.
“There was a lot of buildup around the announcement but what we got was more a warning about where policy is heading than an immediate shock to physical supply,” said Haris Khurshid, chief investment officer at Chicago-based Karobaar Capital LP. “Until secondary sanctions start changing who can buy, ship or even finance Iranian crude, I don’t think traders have much reason to add another geopolitical premium.”
Oman and Iran said the countries' foreign ministers discussed an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz under a temporary framework.
Negotiations between the two countries will continue "with a view to agreeing on a permanent navigational corridor and future administration of the strait," the joint statement said.
While positive, an agreement between Oman and Iran wouldn't result in oil flows through the strait returning to prewar levels, ING analysts Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey said.
"We would likely need to see the U.S. lift its blockade on Iranian ports and ease sanctions on Iran before we see any move towards normalization."
All eyes on domestic supply (and demand) for the next tactical leg...
API
Crude +4.2mm
Cushing +1.0mm
Gasoline -3.2mm
Distillates -459k
DOE
Crude +95k (+500k exp)
Cushing +1.18mm
Gasoline -2.54mm
Distillates -2.23mm
Crude stocks rose for the 4th straight week (but it was a tiny 95k increase) while Cushing saw a modest build off tank bottoms. Product inventories saw large drawdowns..
The Trump admin drained another 3.6mm barrels from the SPR to 289.7 million barrels (1983 lows), approaching the minimum operational level for storage facilities, which ranges between 250 and 300 million barrels.
The combination of a tiny commercial crude build and sizable SPR drain created the biggest net crude drawdown in over a month...
Cushing stocks remain very near 'tank bottoms'
Distillates stocks fell back near 25 year lows and the lowest seasonally on record...
US crude imports from Saudi Arabia picked up recently (but remain well below peak war levels). Crude exports fell below 4 million barrels a day, a threshold closely watched by the market to gauge demand.
US Crude production remains near record highs and while the rig count dipped last week, it is still trending higher overall...
Refining utilization rates are at the highest seasonal level since 1998. That is, in part, due to a shrinking US refining fleet in recent years. But it’s also evidence of how hard fuel-makers are running their plants right now to capture wide margins. They plan to keep that up into the fall, with some companies even deferring maintenance.
WTI was hovering around $81.50 (off the overnight lows) ahead of the official data (down from almost $88 last week)...
Crude is still up about 50% this year as the war - now in its sixth month - continues to disrupt the shipping of crude and refined fuels out of the Middle East.
The impact has been particularly acute in fuel markets, which have also faced a hit from Ukrainian attacks on Russian refiners. That’s helped push premiums over crude to stratospheric levels (but the crack spread is starting to decline)...
At the same time, large volumes of crude supplies continue to transit Hormuz with their satellite signals turned off.
Those volumes are in millions of barrels a day and have helped generally keep a lid on prices that had been expected to soar at the outset of the conflict.
Tyler Durden Wed, 08/26/2026 - 10:40
U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA said it has observed cyberattacks targeting over 100 internet-exposed systems across the U.S. water and wastewater sector, amid a wave of hacks targeting American critical infrastructure. The number of affected systems provides new context to the scale of the ongoing cyberattacks targeting water providers in Michigan, Minnesota, and at least five other states.
The federal agency, which oversees cybersecurity defense and critical infrastructure protections, said in an advisory that the attacks have largely targeted programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which are used to control physical systems and machinery across water providers, energy systems, and other parts of critical infrastructure.
In recent weeks, hackers have targeted PLCs made by several manufacturers, including Rockwell, Schneider Electric, and more recently, Siemens. CISA previously said that the cyberattacks are relying in part on AI tools that rely on public information to develop scripts capable of targeting vulnerable Siemens PLCs.
The intrusions have had little effect on water or waste water supplies to local communities, but have resulted in outages and disruption as incident responders investigate the breaches. CISA previously reported that some of the intrusions allowed hackers to modify affected PLCs to disable shutdown processes and alarms, potentially creating “unsafe conditions” without notifying the affected operators.
Many of the affected communities are in rural or isolated areas, where disruption to critical infrastructure systems can affect a large area of people. Reports citing senior American officials say that U.S. intelligence believes Iran is likely behind the largely opportunistic attacks on water providers, likely in response to the U.
S. and Israel-led war against Iran, but officials have fallen short of a concrete attribution. The intrusions have sparked broader concerns about the cybersecurity and resiliency of critical infrastructure across the United States. U.S. officials have warned in recent years that hackers working for China have been planting destructive malware on critical infrastructure ready to activate as a distraction in the event of an anticipated Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Russia has also been linked to several cyberattacks on water providers, and power and energy grids, across Europe as part of a growing campaign seen as aimed at testing the NATO alliance.