Yuri Ushakov, an aide to the Russian president, has dismissed reports by some Western media outlets claiming that Vladimir Putin refused to meet John Ratcliffe, the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), saying such a meeting was never on the agenda in the first place.<\/p>\n
He told the TASS news agency that the CIA chief met senior officials from Russia’s intelligence community during his visit to Moscow, not the Russian president. According to Ushakov, the talks between the two sides were confidential and entirely official.<\/p>\n
Ushakov also stressed that, because the discussions were secret, he would not provide any details about their content.<\/p>\n
Ratcliffe visited Moscow on Aug. 25. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had earlier said the trip took place as part of contacts between the Russian and US intelligence services, and Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, had also confirmed his meeting with the CIA chief.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Russia says Putin never planned to meet CIA chief John Ratcliffe during his Moscow visit, calling the talks confidential and official.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20957,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}