CIA director, Putin's spy chief hold first phone call in more than 2 years: report

It added that both Ratcliffe and Naryshkin agreed "on maintaining regular contact between the SVR and CIA directors with the aim of facilitating international stability and security and reducing confrontation in relationships between Moscow and Washington." 

The CIA, when contacted Wednesday by Fox News Digital, declined to comment on the matter. 

Rebekah Koffler, a former Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer who specialized in Russian military doctrine, told Fox News Digital that the "Ratcliffe-Naryshkin meeting is supposed to be part of the revival of the CIA-SVR cooperation, which also has been tried before and abandoned." 

"Although such cooperation could be valuable, for example, in the counter-terrorism arena, it always eventually fails because there's a dramatic difference between how the Russians and Americans see the world," she said.

"We are ostensibly in a period of another attempted reset with Russia. Every U.S. president attempted to reset U.S. relations with Moscow and every one of them has failed," Koffler continued. "There's such a fundamental difference between the ways that Moscow and Washington see the world and their role in it that eventually, the policies each pursues come into collision with one another. The way that Russia and the U.S. have defined their national interests have placed the two nations in direct confrontation with each other."

"It is possible that President Trump, who is a realist, will place Russia-U.S. relations on a transactional basis, without the ideological angle, as all the previous administrations, that always drove an edge between the two. It remains to be seen if he will succeed," Koffler also said.