It's been revealed: U.S. official made Putin an "indecent proposal"?

It's been revealed: U.S. official made Putin an "indecent proposal"?

The offer was reportedly part of a plan put together by the administration of President Joe Biden to end the war in Ukraine.

A CIA official told Newsweek that claims in a report by the Swiss-German newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ) that Burns secretly traveled to Moscow in January and that there was a peace proposal made by the director on behalf of the White House were "absolutely false."

Last month, Burns traveled secretly to Kyiv to meet and brief Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the proposal, the Washington Post reported.

Burns reportedly submitted the plan in mid-January to put an end to the war, which began on February 24, 2022. The story was reported by NZZ on Thursday, citing senior German politicians.

Both Kyiv and Moscow rejected the proposal

According to the newspaper, the proposal offered "about 20 percent of the territory of Ukraine" — roughly the size of Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

Kyiv reportedly rejected the proposal "because it is not willing to share its territory," while the Russians rejected the proposal because "they will win the war in the end anyway," reported NZZ, one of Switzerland's most reliable newspapers.

Sean Davey, deputy spokesman for the White House National Security Council, told Newsweek that the NZZ report was "not accurate" and that the CIA would say the same.

According to what NZZ writes, German politicians said that Biden wanted to avoid a protracted war in Ukraine and therefore offered the territory as part of a peace plan.

Only after both Ukraine and Russia rejected the proposal did the Biden administration commit to providing Kyiv with Abrams tanks, NZZ reports.

Peskov denies it

The spokesman of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, called it disinformation that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, was coming to Moscow and offering 20 percent of Ukrainian territory. "It's a journalistic hoax" Peskov said.