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Former President Joe Biden called the Trump administration’s pressure on Ukraine to give up territory to Russia in exchange for a cease-fire “modern-day appeasement.”
In his first interview since leaving the White House, Biden told the BBC on Monday that Putin cannot be appeased.
“I just don’t understand how people think that if we allow a dictator, a thug, to decide he’s going to take significant portions of land that aren’t his, that that’s going to satisfy him,” Biden said.
He added that anybody who thinks Putin would stop after territorial concessions as part of a peace deal “is just foolish.”
President Donald Trump has pushed for a peace deal since returning to office in January.
Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has called a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders “unrealistic,” and last month, Vice President JD Vance said the US was going to “freeze the territorial lines at some level close to where they are today.”
Keith Kellogg, the US’s special envoy for Ukraine, told Fox News on May 6 that under a cease-fire proposal, Russia and Ukraine would retain the territories they currently hold, freezing things in place for “a period of time,” with a 20-mile demilitarized zone.
He likened it to Germany after the end of World War II.
“We say that over time things will change, and that’s what we tell the Ukrainians,” Kellogg said. “The same thing when you look at what happened with Germany. The Germans always wanted a unified Germany after World War II. They didn’t get it right away, but eventually they got it.”
But Biden said that Trump’s Ukraine policy could also have a broader impact on US and European relations.
“Europe is going to lose confidence in the certainty of America and the leadership of America,” he said.
Biden also criticized the Trump administration’s approach to NATO. “I don’t understand how they fail to understand that there’s strength in alliances,” Biden told the BBC. “It saves us money overall.”
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