The White House denied reports of an agreement for Ukraine and Russia “territory in exchange for peace”

The White House has denied reports that CIA director William Burns offered Russian President Volodymyr Putin a fifth of Ukraineʼs territory in exchange for ending the war.

The Deputy press secretary of the National Security Council of the White House Sean DeWitt said this in a comment to Newsweek.

Sean DeWitt noted that the report by the Swiss-German newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) was "not true" and that the CIA would say the same.

A CIA official told Newsweek that claims in the NZZ report that Burns secretly traveled to Moscow in January and that the director made a peace offer on behalf of the White House were "absolutely false."

• On February 1, the Swiss-German publication Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported that in mid-January, the U.S. President Joe Biden sent the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to Kyiv and Moscow with a proposal for an agreement — Ukraine gives up part of the territories, and Russia stops the war. Both countries refused.