President Donald Trump said on Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attack a NATO country, and he played down media reports that CIA Director John Ratcliffe warned Russian officials against such an attack earlier in the week.

“He’s not going to attack a NATO territory,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

Earlier in the day, Trump told Axios in a phone interview that there would be no such attack, and that Ratcliffe had not been dispatched to Moscow to deliver any particular message.

“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,” Trump told the news outlet.

European and U.S. intelligence officials have long monitored Russian sabotage and gray zone attacks in Europe that fall below the threshold of full-on war and are generally aimed at weakening NATO’s unity and its member states’ willingness to support Ukraine against Russian aggression.

(Reporting by Gram Slattery and Bo Erickson; editing by Michelle Nichols )