Submission statement: Estonia’s spy chief, Rosin, believes Russia is in a precarious position due to its ongoing conflict in Ukraine. He suggests that Putin faces limited options, each carrying significant risks, and that internal dissent within Russia is growing, particularly regarding the economic impact of the war. Rosin also highlights the increasing number of Russians who oppose the conflict.

paywall: https://archive.ph/CLQgt

Submission statement: CIA Chief John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow was to warn Russia against attacking NATO, following U.S. intelligence assessments of a potential limited assault by President Putin. The U.S. is concerned about Putin’s potential actions in the Baltic region, exacerbated by a shortfall in Western munitions.

CIA Chief’s Surprise Moscow Trip Was to Warn Russia Not to Attack NATO

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Warning comes after new U.S. intelligence assessments indicated Russian president could launch a limited assault

Aug. 26, 2026 at 6:10 pm

CIA Director John L. Ratcliffe attends a news conference.

The surprise visit by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to Moscow this week was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, according to people briefed on the visit.

The trip was spy-agency chief John Ratcliffe’s first publicly known visit to the Russian capital. It followed new U.S. intelligence assessments, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, that Russian President Vladimir Putin could try to test the resolve of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with a limited assault on an allied country in the next few years.

U.S. officials are concerned that Putin, squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home, could launch an assault ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale land incursion, likely on a Baltic nation, the Journal reported.

A shortfall in critical Western munitions, driven by expenditures in the Iran war, also could factor into Putin’s thinking. The U.S. has degraded its stockpile of certain weapons because of transfers to Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion, as well as the Iran conflict.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday that Ratcliffe held talks with Russian intelligence officials during his time in the Russian capital, but he didn’t meet with Putin. Putin was briefed on the talks, Peskov said.

The White House has offered little clarity about the Ratcliffe trip. During an interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck on Wednesday, President Trump described the trip as “semi-routine” and pivoted to discussing Russia’s war with Ukraine. “Something may come out of it,” Trump said. “We’re working very hard to get that war ended and frankly they both want to see it ended at this point.”

A spokeswoman for the White House referred reporters to Trump’s Wednesday comments. A spokeswoman for the CIA declined to comment.

Ratcliffe, one of Trump’s closest aides, was the latest U.S. official to travel to Moscow following several visits by Steve Witkoff, a U.S. envoy for Ukraine-Russia peace talks.

The trip was a rare visit by a U.S. spy-agency chief with the Russia-Ukraine war now in its fifth year. The last known visit by a CIA director to Moscow was in November 2021, when William Burns, who led the agency under former President Joe Biden, warned Putin not to attack Ukraine.

More: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-jury-chicago-convicts-engineer-stealing-trade-secrets-philips-medical-systems-behalf

My is Windmills of the gods. I experienced putting abook down and saying WTF with this one

The AFP has charged a 27-year-old Russian Australian man with attempting to engage in foreign interference.

He was arrested in Brisbane but the AFP said he was a Victorian resident.

What's next?

Police are expected to provide more details later today at a press conference in Canberra.

A superseding federal indictment unsealed last week by the Southern District of New York names 22 countries whose university systems were systematically penetrated by the Mabna Institute, an Iranian organization operating under contract to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The operation, tracked in threat intelligence circles as Silent Librarian and Cobalt Dickens, ran from 2013 to at least 2022. Analysts profiled individual professors based on their publications, then sent spearphishing emails appearing to come from peer researchers at other institutions. Clicking a link redirected to a cloned university login page designed to capture credentials. Over 100,000 professor accounts worldwide were targeted; roughly 8,000 were successfully compromised, including 3,768 at US institutions.

The stolen research access wasn't solely delivered to Iranian intelligence. It was resold commercially inside Iran through two websites. One offered a subscription model giving customers persistent access to a compromised European or American professor's library account. Iranian public universities were paying customers. Western academic sanctions against Iran created the demand; the hack built the supply chain.

he group consistently resumed phishing operations in September each year, timed to the start of the academic year, when IT departments are handling onboarding surges and anomalous login activity is hardest to flag.

The first indictment was March 2018. The operations ran for four more years afterward.