The White House responded to a report that CIA Director, William Burns, offered Russian President Vladimir Putin a fifth of Ukraine’s territory to end the war as part of a peace plan drawn by the Joe Biden administration. A CIA official told Newsweek that the report which states that William Burns took a secret trip to Moscow in January and that there was a peace proposal put forward is “completely false.”
Last month, the CIA directors traveled in secret to meet and brief Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, The Washington Post had reported. Later NZZ reported that William Burns was attempting to broker a peace deal between the countries but both Kyiv and Moscow reportedly rejected the proposal.
The proposal offered “around 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory” but Kyiv shut down the proposal “because they are not willing to have their territory divided” while Russia said they “will win the war in the long run anyway,” the NZZ reported.
Sean Davett, deputy spokesperson at White House’s National Security Council, said that the report is “not accurate.”
William Burns and Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, “wanted to end the war quickly so they could focus on China,” while Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin “didn’t want to let Russia get away with destroying the rule-based peace order and called for massive military support for Ukraine”, the report further claimed.
