President Biden Blasts China’s Peace Plan: “Putin Is Applauding It, So How Can It Be Any Good?”

President Joe Biden expressed skepticism regarding China’s alleged peace plan between Russia and Ukraine, as the war between the countries wages on for more than one year—while Russian President Vladimir Putin accused NATO of trying to dissolve his country. 

“I’ve seen nothing in the plan that would indicate that there is something that would be beneficial to anyone other than Russia if the Chinese plan were followed,” Biden said on ABC’s “This Week.”

At the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, China’s top diplomat Wang Yi told world leaders that China is working on a peace proposal to end the conflict in Ukraine. However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken received contradictory reports from U.S. intelligence: “Based on information we have that [China is] considering providing lethal support, and we’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for us and in our relationship.” 

If China offered military aid to Russia against Ukraine, Biden said that the United States “would respond.” 

On Sunday, Biden also took aim at Putin, who has praised China’s peace proposal: “Putin is applauding it, so how could it be any good? I’m not being facetious,” he said. “I’m being deadly earnest.”

“The idea that China is going to be negotiating the outcome of a war that’s a totally unjust war for Ukraine is just not rational,” Biden continued.

The Russian leader accused NATO of actively participating in the war in Ukraine and working to dismantle his country. “They have one goal: to disband the former Soviet Union and its fundamental part – the Russian Federation,” Putin retorted on Sunday.

“In today’s conditions, when all the leading NATO countries have declared their main goal as inflicting a strategic defeat on us, so that our people suffer as they say, how can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions?” Putin added. He also said defensively that since the dissolution of the USSR, the West has “tried to reshape the world exclusively on their terms. We had no choice but to react.”

CIA Director William Burns told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he thinks Putin has “looked at Ukraine’s evolution over the last decade, what he’s seen is Ukraine’s stubborn independence, its democratic progress, its movement toward the West in political and economic and security terms, largely accelerated by Putin himself through his aggression in Crimea in 2014. He’s seen that as a direct threat to the ambition that cuts to the core of his view as a Russian leader, and I think that’s the backdrop to the horrific aggression that he’s launched.”

In honor of Ukraine’s Day of Resistance to Occupation of Crimea and Sevastopol—nine years since Ukrainians gathered outside of the Crimean parliament building to protest the peninsula from being annexed by Russia—Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted on Sunday:

“Now, one year since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we are yet again reminded of the bravery of people of Ukraine, who continue to make immense sacrifices in service of their country…Every day, Ukrainians continue to show their courage and resilience as they defend themselves and their country from Russia’s brutal attacks on people, including its repeated human rights violations, and targeting of Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.” He added, “We will continue to use every tool at our disposal to support Ukraine, for as long as it takes.”