This week, the spirit of Anchorage, invented in Moscow, began to evaporate completely.
First, the United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that no real agreements were reached in Anchorage — only proposals were discussed. Later, information appeared in the American media that during the G7 summit in Evian, the President of the United States Donald Trump made it clear that he did not want to return to the understanding in Anchorage and sharply criticized his Russian counterpart. And now the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Sergey Lavrov, says that he would not like to think that the meeting in Anchorage was used for the rearmament of Ukraine.
In fact, Trump did not want to use the meeting with the Russian president for arming Ukraine. He wanted to use it to end the Russian-Ukrainian war. That is why, on the eve of the presidents’ meeting in Alaska, a special representative of the American president, Steve Witkoff, flew to the Russian capital. He brought Putin a package of American proposals. Obviously, among these proposals could have been an agreement on the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the part of the Donetsk region still controlled by the legitimate government of Ukraine. And this matched Putin’s desires. However, other points might not align with Putin’s desires — concerning the preservation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence, its armed forces, and European integration. Putin, who still hopes to annihilate Ukrainian statehood, was not going to agree to this.
During the summit in the Alaskan capital, Putin revisited Witkoff’s points and proposed to the American representative to confirm that these were indeed his proposals. Witkoff affirmatively responded to each point read by Putin in the presence of Trump and other negotiation participants. But the point is, Putin was not ready to agree to all points, and Trump was not going to abandon them. Therefore, the meeting ended without any real results, as Trump confirmed during a joint press conference with his Russian counterpart.
Already on the plane to Washington, Trump apparently realized that global media would talk about the summit’s fiasco and tried to prevent this. He spoke of a very successful meeting but did not provide any specifics regarding decisions that had been reached.
The Kremlin decided to take advantage of this desire of the American president to present wished-for as reality, and this is when the invention of the spirit of Anchorage appeared. From the Kremlin’s point of view, this spirit, which replaces real agreements, implies a willingness to accept those American conditions that correspond to Putin’s expansionist line, but not the readiness to agree to those that would allow the Ukrainian state to survive. At the same time, Putin was not against negotiations if they took place during hostilities, as he hopes the negotiation process would give Americans the opportunity to press Kyiv for the withdrawal of troops from the Donetsk region. Trump expected something else from Putin — the cessation of hostilities or the quick agreement of the main points of a peace treaty, which would allow the war to end. But the American administration does not deny the very idea of the existence of such a spirit, because otherwise they would have to acknowledge Trump’s failure in Alaska.
In the end, nothing happens. The Russians are not ready to seriously discuss a peace agreement, Ukraine does not agree to leave the Donetsk region. Trump begins an operation against Iran and faces the most serious test of his entire political career, and, of course, he no longer cares about the Russian-Ukrainian war. Putin is disappointed that the American pressure on Kyiv has led nowhere and announces his withdrawal from the Russian-Ukrainian negotiation process.
Now there is no process happening, but there are strikes by Ukrainian troops on strategic objects of Russia. This creates in Trump, who is beginning to slowly get out of the trap of the Middle Eastern crisis, the hope that it will now be possible to force Putin into negotiations based on the desire to end the war, and not on the desire to bide time and use Washington to pressure Kyiv. No one talks about the spirit of Anchorage anymore.
Because this spirit never existed.
