Putin Won’t Attack NATO Territory, Trump Says

President Donald Trump said during a press conference in the Oval Office on Aug. 27 that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not expand the war with Ukraine by attacking NATO countries.

“I’ve had good talks with him. He’s not going to be attacking a NATO territory,” Trump said when asked if Putin had agreed not to attack NATO members.

Trump’s Oval Office comments came just one day after The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and ABC News reported that CIA Director John Ratcliffe had warned Russia not to attack NATO members during a surprise visit to Moscow on Aug. 25.

Asked to confirm these reports, Trump told reporters Thursday, “I don’t want to comment on that, but they’re not going to attack.”

Earlier on Thursday, Trump was asked by Axios about potential Russian aggression against NATO members. He said he was “not concerned” and there was “no problem.” The CIA director’s trip to Moscow was “standard business,” Trump said.

“Ratcliffe sees his Russian counterpart once every six months or once every year. They have a very good relationship. There was no message and there was nothing unusual,” the president told Axios.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, warned on Aug. 27 that France and the United Kingdom were “playing with fire” and could face unpredictable consequences for “trying to dodge responsibility for deep strikes into Russia by shifting the assembly role to Ukraine.”

During a visit to Kyiv on Aug. 24, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced that the UK would provide Ukraine with classified technical information for British components used to make SCALP missiles, a French-produced version of the UK’s Storm Shadow missiles.

“London says it is ready to give [Kyiv] the technology to produce Storm Shadow missiles on its own,” the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote in a Thursday statement on X. “We have repeatedly warned: strikes using British weapons could trigger a response against UK military facilities in Ukraine & beyond.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also warned of “inevitable catastrophic consequences” if the UK did not reverse its decision. British military targets could be targeted by Russia in response to Ukrainian strikes using British weapons, she said during a news briefing on Aug. 27.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed on Aug. 26 that Ratcliffe met with Russian intelligence officials but did not meet with Putin.

Russian media outlets had reported that a U.S. Air Force aircraft had been spotted at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport on Aug. 25. The media outlets said a motorcade of vehicles with U.S. diplomatic license plates had also been spotted in Moscow.

Flight tracking data from Flightradar24 showed that a U.S. Boeing C-17A Globemaster III with the U.S.-registered tail number 07-7181 departed from Latvia’s Riga Airport and landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport on Tuesday morning.

Prior to Ratcliffe’s trip, the last direct flight of a U.S.-registered aircraft from Europe to Russia occurred in January, when special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with Putin to discuss the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Surprise visits by high-level U.S. officials have historically been used as a back channel to deliver warnings to Russia. In November 2021, then-CIA Director William Burns made a secret trip to Moscow just months before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Emel Akan and Owen Evans contributed to this report.