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.