A U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III jet landed sometime before dawn Tuesday at Vnukovo Airport in Moscow, which was built for private non-commercial flight operators and had been stopped off in Riga on the way. The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, was on board for his first-ever visit to Russia in the Trump presidency. No one in Washington said so. It wasn't confirmed by anyone in Moscow until reporters had traced the tail number three nations. That's a sign of how this war is now being conducted: not on a podium or through the arm of the press, but through men who don't pick up the phone and unmarked aircraft.

The Kremlin finally spoke, but not about Ratcliffe meeting Vladimir Putin, but on what did not happen. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state media that Ratcliffe did not meet the Russian president, and that it would be "premature" to view this visit as a change in the diplomatic landscape between the two nations. That's a well-formulated lie, which is what Moscow does do. What we do know, by a scattering of American sources, is that Ratcliffe met with his Russian intelligence opposite numbers, not long ago, certainly not since early last year, when he was apparently in frequent contact with the head of the Russian SVR, Sergei Naryshkin. We also know that ahead of his arrival, Washington had called Kyiv to request that it suspend any drone or missile attacks on the Russian capital and other cities in the north for three days from Monday to Wednesday which makes sense if the Americans were afraid to risk their own director being hit by missiles during a strike.

Take away the theater, and what remains is a tried-and-true Cold War weapon, dusted off and given a new life: intelligence-to-intelligence diplomacy, not necessarily mutually exclusive from but perhaps proof that formal diplomacy didn't work. The most recent time the sitting CIA director visited Moscow was in November 2021, when William Burns met Putin personally, and unsuccessfully, to show him the error of his ways on the matter of invading Ukraine. After three months the tanks started to roll. Whether anyone likes it or not, that history has followed this trip, and that's why so many capitals are trying to interpret a single unmarked flight as a policy document.

It's the timing that makes it impossible to shrug off. Trump's stated goal of “ending the war in Ukraine” has come to a standstill for months. Putin has maintained that the talks are technically on-going, but he has also insisted that Kyiv return lands that his troops have taken by force a demand Washington and Ukraine have refused to meet. Ukraine meanwhile is carrying out drone and long-range strikes deeper into Russian territory, with targets increasingly closer to the capital city, and has seen its military strike refineries, energy infrastructure and other targets nonetheless, putting Russian air-defence forces deployed for a different battle to use. Add to that a second, no less incendiary, battle between Washington and Tehran over Tehran's nuclear posture and the security of the Strait of Hormuz, where Moscow is also quietly playing the role of supplier and even diplomatic back channel. A CIA director doesn't need to have a public podium to talk about any of that. He wants a room and he found that one.

The economy provides a more focused angle to the trip. Brent crude prices have been bouncing off all rumors of escalation or de-escalation since Ukraine's peace process briefly appeared viable in mid-December, when they were trading near $58 a barrel; they peaked above $120 during the peak of the Iran confrontation in April before falling back toward $89-90 a barrel this week as concerns about a wider Gulf war subsided. It is not a side effect of the Moscow visit, it is the essence. Several dollars a barrel off crude prices, analysts at Goldman Sachs and S&P Global both estimated, could be the cost of a durable Russia-Ukraine settlement, as sanctioned Russian barrels reappear on normal shipping lanes, although the most will agree the Russian output recovery would be a gradual one, rather than sudden and dramatic, due to underinvestment and an onerous tax regime for crude producers. A bipartisan sanctions bill passed by the Senate is now in the House and would impose penalties on Russian officials and impose tariffs as high as 100% on nations that continue to purchase Russian energy, something Russian analysts already believe it will further undermine the ruble if passed. In between those two pressures is Ratcliffe's trip – the threat of tougher sanctions from the White House, and the maintenance of a channel of communication to Moscow hot enough to use.

None of this assures a breakthrough, however, and on both sides officials have kept their mouths closed on promises of one. What it does guarantee, however, is that the next phase of the war if there is one will not take place in the conference rooms of Geneva or Abu Dhabi, but rather in “the kind of conference that nobody takes pictures of” between two men whose job it is to know things governments don't want to say out loud.