The American news portal Newsweek writes that both the White House and the CIA reacted to the news that William Burns, the director of the CIA, offered Vladimir Putin a fifth of the territory of Ukraine to end the ongoing war as part of a peace plan developed on behalf of President Biden. The Washington Post has already revealed that Burns allegedly visited Kiev to inform Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about the plans. It is understood that both Kiev and Moscow rejected the proposal.
A CIA official was at pains to point out that claims in a report in the Swiss-German newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) that Burns had secretly traveled to Moscow in January and that the director had made a peace proposal on behalf of the White House were "absolutely false."
At the same time, according to media reports, Kiev has completely distanced itself from the alleged proposal, "because it does not want its territory to be divided," while according to Russian officials, "they will win the war in the long run anyway," the NZZ article stated. By the way, the offered 20 percent roughly corresponds to the size of the eastern Donbass region.
Sean Davett, deputy spokesman for the White House's National Security Council, told Newsweek that the Swiss newspaper's information was "not accurate" and that the CIA would also say the same about the matter.
According to German politicians, Biden wanted to avoid prolonging the war with this step.
After both Ukraine and Russia rejected the offer, the Biden administration immediately came up with the idea of supplying Kiev with Abrams tanks.
The mentioned German politicians believe that Washington is very divided on the question of how to handle the war in Ukraine that broke out almost a year ago. They say Burns and Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, "wanted to end the war quickly so they could focus on China."
while Foreign Secretary Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were "unwilling to let Russia get away with destroying the rules-based peace order and demanded massive military support for Ukraine".
Source: hirado.hu
Featured image: AFP
