US President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on 27 August 2026 that Vladimir Putin would not move against NATO territory. "I've had good talks with him. He's not going to be attacking a NATO territory," Trump said. It was one of at least two separate public statements he made on the subject that day.
Earlier the same day, in a phone interview with Axios, Trump said he was "not concerned at all" about the prospect of a Russian attack on NATO, calling it "no problem."
The statements came after US media reported that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Ratcliffe had travelled to Moscow, with some outlets characterising the trip as an effort to warn Russia against any move on NATO members. Trump rejected that framing. He called Ratcliffe's visit "standard business" and said the CIA director meets his Russian counterpart "once every six months or once every year," according to Axios and other reports.
Ratcliffe met with Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), according to ANNews. He did not meet with Putin. The visit was the first by a CIA director to Moscow since 2021, The Manila Times reported. The full content of those discussions has not been disclosed.
The Kremlin added its voice to the denials. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov described reports of a possible Russian attack on NATO as "scare stories" with "nothing to do with reality," according to The Manila Times.
A European intelligence official, speaking anonymously, said that "European services in general do not see any risk of an attack from Russia to the European countries, and this assessment has not changed," the same report noted.
Trump has struck this tone before. At the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in The Hague in June 2025, he promised European officials that Russia would not attack NATO while he remained president, according to News Ukraine.
The reassurances sit uneasily alongside a separate strand of analysis. EU military intelligence has assessed that Putin is preparing to attack NATO countries within five years, with a Bloomberg-published scenario pointing to the Baltic States as a likely starting point, the same source reported. What intelligence underlies that timeline, and whether any formal commitment from Putin has been sought or received by Washington, remains unknown.
What triggered the media reports that prompted Trump's and the Kremlin's denials on 27 August has not been publicly established.
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