A cease-fire proposal could come out of Monday's meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, but Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy won't agree to it, former National Security Council Chief of Staff Fred Fleitz tells Newsmax.
"I expect there will be some type of a cease-fire proposal coming out of this meeting that Putin agrees to, but Zelenskyy will not agree to it because it will require him to give up territory," Fleitz, now the vice chair for the Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute, said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America."
"China's long-term goal is establishing a Chinese-like global order and to promote Chinese influence, but I think the short-term goal is to end this war on the best possible terms for Russia," he added.
Fleitz, also a Newsmax contributor, said that Xi will find that even though he was able to negotiate a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran "fairly easily," that came because the Saudis were using him to gain leverage with the United States.
"Zelenskyy has another agenda, and I think pushing this plan with [him] will be much harder," said Fleitz.
Meanwhile, retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier Gen. Blaine Holt, appearing on the program with Fleitz, said in his opinion, China won't invade Taiwan soon, despite the amount of saber-rattling that has been going on, because "they don't want to get themselves into that mess."
"Tactically they're going to threaten it," Holt, also a former deputy military adviser for NATO and a Newsmax contributor, commented. "They're going to show that they are going to be menacing. But Xi Jinping and the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] have a lot of groundwork to do before they're going to get to that place. It could be sooner. It could be a year or two."
However, things at home in China "couldn't be in more disarray," said Holt, "and that's why we see a very dangerous CCP with this adventurism on the global stage."
It will also be "very risky" for Zelenskyy to take the planned call with Xi, said Holt.
"It'll almost seem to President Zelenskyy that if President Xi turns Putin loose, he can upgrade to a whole lot of array of weapons that Ukraine hasn't even seen yet," said Holt.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States is trying to head off a cease-fire proposal from China.
John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council commented that "a cease-fire now is again effectively the ratification of Russian conquest," and Fleitz said he thinks there is "some truth" to that."
However, members of Congress are increasingly interested in a cease-fire, and the French and British "would like to see some type of an endgame here," said Fleitz.
However, the Biden administration "won't even talk about it," he added.
"Maybe the Xi plan will be a bad one, but Biden has to come up with his own cease-fire plan," said Fleitz.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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