Did Biden offer Russia Ukrainian territory?

A European newspaper quotes a report attributed to a Russian news agency that US President Joe Biden sent CIA Director William Burns on a secret mission to Moscow and Kiev in mid-January. Russian President Vladimir Putin would have been offered 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory as part of an offer for peace and an end to the war. For its part, the White House categorically rejected this claim, writes Salem AlKetbi, UAE political analyst and former Federal National Council candidate.

But questions remain about the background and likelihood of this matter. The rebuttal came not only from Sean Davitt, deputy press secretary of the White House National Security Council, and a US intelligence official.

There is also an official rebuttal from Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who called the news misleading and completely untrue, and denied that the CIA director had paid a secret visit to Moscow.

The newspaper report reproduced these allegations in the context of explaining the circumstances and background of the statement by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and US President Joe Biden on the deployment of Leopard 2 and Abrams tanks to Ukraine. In parallel, the Washington Post reported that Burns had made a secret visit to Kiev before the US announcement to send tanks to Ukraine.

He reportedly met with President Volodymyr Zelensky and discussed developments in the situation with him. The MPs also quoted a European newspaper report that the peace offer rejected by Russia and Ukraine was made against the backdrop of a split in US decision-making circles over how to deal with the situation in Ukraine.

CIA Director William Burns and US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan reportedly want to seek a political solution to end the war in order to focus their attention on China, while Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin remain determined to continue supporting Kiev.

When analysing such reports, one cannot categorically rule out the hypothesis of their credibility in the face of official denials, even if they come from the Russian side, which at first sight has vested interests in announcing such events or even leaving them without official denials, also in terms of propaganda and to emphasise the strength of the Russian position.

There is reason to believe that the deployment of tanks is nothing more than an attempt to exert maximum pressure on Russia.

The operational effectiveness of these tanks will not be as high as some imagine, either because the number of tanks specified is limited (14 Leopard-2 tanks and 31 Abrams tanks), so it is difficult to rely on them to resolve ground battles, or these tanks, or at least American tanks, will not get into Ukraine as quickly. Moreover, the lack of air support makes their task on the battlefield extremely difficult.

The link between the deployment of these tanks and Russia’s rejection of the alleged US offer does not seem convincing. The suggestion was rejected not only in the Kremlin but also among the Ukrainian leadership, the report says. However true this report may be, the search for a way out of the crisis at the intelligence level should already be there.

Almost certainly there are covert channels between Russia and the US to consider a solution to the Ukrainian crisis, especially since most of the US objectives in Ukraine have been achieved, both militarily and economically.

The best strategic interest of the US at present is to prevent the Ukraine crisis from escalating into a full-scale war in Europe, with all the ensuing consequences that would spell strategic disaster for the US, which might be forced to intervene to defend its European allies and abandon the idea of meeting the growing Chinese challenge in Asia.

It is therefore possible that the US will try to check the pulse of the Russian and Ukrainian sides. Such communications are like trial balloons to gauge the degree of acceptance of the idea on both sides or to prepare public opinion to accept certain concessions or compromises, common practice for intelligence circles in such circumstances.

The current situation on the ground is so complex that it is hard to predict that either side will resolve the conflict militarily, implying a protracted crisis that will inevitably end with both parties sitting down at the negotiating table, as in most military conflicts in history.

At the same time, it is hardly conceivable that Russia will completely withdraw from Ukrainian territory unless there is a complete military defeat of the Russian army.

This is also unlikely, as the Russian leadership has stated that it rejects a military defeat of its country even if it is forced to resort to nuclear weapons, so that a Ukrainian military victory over the Russian army is also hard to conceive under the current circumstances. So the conflict remains within a framework of mutual attrition if it continues at this rate.

The above analysis does not necessarily mean that a US offer to Moscow is likely, for the simple reason that CIA Director William Burns believes that the next six months will be “very crucial” to the final outcome of the war.

Burns believes that the solution will be on the battlefield over the next six months and that the need to break “Putin’s pride” is one of the steps necessary to resolve the Ukrainian crisis. Now he is unlikely to make him an offer he knows in advance he will not accept. So the decision to send tanks to Ukraine may have been closely linked to Burns’ visit to Kiev in January.

It was also linked to his belief that it was important to prevent Russia by all means from advancing further into Ukrainian territory and to send a clear signal to the Kremlin that the scenario of losing territory captured by Russian forces in Ukraine was on the cards, that Ukraine could not be conquered, that Western support for Ukraine would not wane and that intimidation had no effect on Western allies. All this, according to US intelligence, could break the Kremlin’s pride and force it to rethink its intervention in Ukraine.

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