OPINION: Anchorage produced nothing — but Moscow talks as if everything was signed there

OPINION: Anchorage produced nothing — but Moscow talks as if everything was signed there

Introduction: A meeting without an agreement that haunts all peace diplomacy

June 25, 2026 — Rubio says the words everyone already knew

On June 25, 2026, in Manama (Bahrain), US Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded to journalists with unusually direct clarity. "There was no agreement in Alaska. There was a proposal in Alaska, but no agreement. If there had been an agreement, we would have had an end to the war." These three sentences constitute the most explicit American disavowal ever spoken about one of the most important rhetorical constructions in Russian diplomacy over the past ten months: the Anchorage agreement.

What Rubio says is not a surprise to those who follow this file. The summit between Trump and Putin at Elmendorf-Richardson Joint Base on August 15, 2025 ended without any public announcement of an agreement, without a press conference, without a signed document. Trump declared as he left the room: "There is no deal until there is a deal." It is not the habit of signing something and saying nothing. But Russia had a different reading.

The architecture of Russian diplomatic fiction

Since September 2025, at least three senior Russian officials have invoked the "Anchorage agreements" as the basis for any negotiation on Ukraine. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that Putin and Trump, during the summit, had "agreed on the way to end the fighting and resolve all remaining issues." Putin's foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, invoked "fundamental agreements" on Ukraine. The Kremlin referenced the "spirit of Anchorage" in dozens of official communiqués.

The analysis of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) is unequivocal: Russia is "exploiting the ambiguity surrounding the outcomes of the August 2025 Alaska summit to claim that this summit produced a mutual Russian-American understanding, while presenting this agreement in a way that favors Russia." This is precisely the definition of ghost diplomacy: creating the fiction of a pre-existing agreement to constrain future negotiations from a position already favorable to Moscow.

What actually happened in Anchorage on August 15, 2025

A real meeting, substantive discussions, zero formal agreement

The Anchorage summit took place. That is a fact. Trump and Putin met. Rubio and Lavrov were in the room. Special envoy Steve Witkoff had brought to Moscow, a few days before the summit, a document of American proposals. According to Lavrov, Putin went through these proposals point by point with Witkoff in the room, and Witkoff confirmed at each point that he had "faithfully captured the ideas" brought to Moscow.

The question is: does this confirmation of proposals by Witkoff constitute an "agreement"? Rubio's answer is no — and he is right from a standard diplomatic standpoint. An envoy who presents proposals and confirms they match the document he brought is not signing an agreement. He is confirming a starting point for discussion. Lavrov knows perfectly well what the distinction is. But the ambiguity is useful to him: by insisting on Witkoff's confirmation as the equivalent of an agreement, Moscow can claim that the United States "accepted its conditions" without having to produce a signed document.

The "Russian conditions" that blocked everything

Rubio was also precise on this point. When asked what Russia wanted at Anchorage, he replied: "Russia wants all of Donetsk turned over to them, among other things." This formulation summarizes the fundamental problem: Russia's maximum conditions include recognition of four Ukrainian oblasts (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia) as Russian territory, Ukraine's permanent neutrality, and lasting constraints on Ukrainian armed forces. These are unacceptable conditions for Kyiv and incompatible with the public positions of Ukraine's allies.

Ukrainska Pravda reported that Lavrov, responding to Rubio, maintained his position: "If one party — the United States — puts forward its settlement proposals, its ideas on how to approach this crisis, and the other party expresses agreement with these proposals, then saying there was no agreement does not seem particularly elegant." The argument is clever: Moscow does not claim that Trump accepted Russian conditions — it claims that Russia accepted American conditions, and that it is therefore Washington that is not honoring its own proposals. This is a remarkably sophisticated reversal of the burden of proof.

The "spirit of Anchorage" — a formula created to circumvent reality

How an empty expression became an instrument of pressure

The expression "spirit of Anchorage" was launched by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in the weeks following the summit. It is deliberately vague — a "spirit" is not a text, cannot be verified, cannot be contradicted with precise quotations. It is a formulation that allows Moscow to claim a diplomatic heritage from Anchorage without having to specify what it contains. And since Trump himself had described the summit as "a great and very good day" without denying the Russian claims, the ambiguity flourished.

CNN's analysis from January 2026 — "Beware of the Anchorage formula" — was already documenting how Russia used the summit's ambiguity to assert that a peace framework already existed, and that it was Kyiv and its allies who were blocking its implementation. Since then, according to ISW data, Russian officials have invoked the "Anchorage agreements" or the "spirit of Anchorage" in dozens of communiqués, interviews and official statements. Through the force of repetition, a fiction acquired a form of institutional reality.

The White House's role in perpetuating the ambiguity

We must here point to a responsibility of the American administration itself. For ten months, neither the White House nor the State Department publicly and directly contradicted Russian claims about Anchorage. When journalists asked White House spokesperson Anna Kelly what the "Anchorage formula" meant, she replied: "You'll have to ask them." This non-answer was an invitation to persistent ambiguity.

Why this silence? Several explanations are plausible. Trump may not have wanted to publicly contradict Putin, preserving a personal relationship he considers politically useful. The administration may have wanted to maintain some flexibility in negotiations. Or perhaps, as some ISW analysts suggest, certain of Witkoff's proposals brought to Moscow were genuinely problematic for Kyiv, and disavowing them publicly would have raised questions about what exactly the United States had proposed. Rubio's June 25 statement closes this chapter — but it comes ten months too late.

What Russia really wanted at Anchorage

The territories and "denazification" — the terms never accepted

Lavrov described the American proposals brought by Witkoff as including elements protecting the "Russians of a Nazi regime seeking to eliminate the Russian language, culture, history and Orthodoxy." This formulation — borrowed from Russia's internal propaganda discourse on the "denazification" of Ukraine — is presented as having been included in an American document. If accurate, this means Witkoff's proposals contained elements of language directly aligned with Kremlin rhetoric — which would explain why the American administration was reluctant to make them public.

As for territories, Rubio confirmed that Russia demanded "all of Donetsk" — including the parts still controlled by Ukraine. Added to Luhansk (entirely under Russian control), Zaporizhzhia and Kherson (partially occupied), Russian demands extend to approximately 20% of internationally recognized Ukrainian territory, in addition to Crimea annexed in 2014. Accepting these conditions without further fighting would be a capitulation — not a negotiated peace. This is why Kyiv rejects them.

The war continues while the rhetoric flourishes

While Lavrov and Rubio were disputing the definitions of a fictitious agreement, the Russian army continued to bombard Ukrainian targets. ISW offensive campaign updates for the week of June 23, 2026 document continued assaults on front lines in Donetsk, drone strikes on energy infrastructure, and advance attempts in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia sectors. Putin declared on June 23 that Russia would only negotiate based on the alleged agreements of the Alaska summit — a formulation that in reality means "we will only negotiate if you accept our preconditions."

This dual posture — invoking Anchorage agreements to appear diplomatically reasonable while continuing military operations — is the hallmark of the Kremlin since the start of the war. The invocation of a fictitious diplomatic framework allows Moscow to present itself as a good-faith actor before non-Western audiences, while maintaining the military pressure that Russia uses as its real negotiating lever.

What Rubio's declaration changes — and does not change

A belated but important disavowal

Rubio's declaration is important for at least two reasons. First, it closes a rhetorical breach that Russia was exploiting: henceforth, the US Secretary of State has publicly stated that he was personally present at Anchorage and that there was no agreement. This firsthand testimony is difficult to circumvent. Lavrov may attempt to refute it — as he did on June 26 — but the official American denial is now on record.

Second, Rubio's declaration fits into a broader context of American repositioning. According to sources cited in Ukrainian media, the United States recently signed a joint declaration with Ukraine affirming that Washington is "no longer a neutral mediator but stands alongside Ukraine in support of its territorial sovereignty and territorial integrity." If confirmed, this repositioning is significant: it means that the period of ambiguity about the American position regarding Ukraine — exacerbated by the silence on Anchorage — is officially over.

What this does not change for Kyiv

For Zelensky and Ukraine, Rubio's clarification is welcome but resolves nothing urgent. The front line is where it is. The bombs fall. The real negotiations — those involving painful compromises on territory, security, guarantees — have not begun. And even if Washington verbally reinforces its support, American military capacity provided to Ukraine remains subject to internal political debates.

Russia, for its part, has no reason to change strategy. After ten months of building the Anchorage fiction, a denial from Rubio is not going to erase the narrative infrastructure Moscow has built. It will simply adapt its rhetoric — perhaps now insisting that it is America that "betrayed" its own Anchorage proposals, reinforcing a narrative of Western betrayal that resonates in non-aligned countries. The lie has been refuted. The audience for the lie, however, has not disappeared.

Ghost diplomacy as Russian war doctrine

Anchorage is not an accident — it is a system

The Anchorage operation fits within a broader doctrine Russia has used for years: ghost diplomacy. The idea is to create, amplify or exploit ambiguities in diplomatic processes to produce fictitious obligations without the real constraints of treaties. In 2015, the Minsk agreements were signed — but Russia constantly interpreted them in a way that favored its positions while accusing Ukraine of non-compliance. In 2022, preliminary peace talks in Turkey were abandoned after, according to Ukrainian sources, the United Kingdom advised Kyiv not to trust them.

Anchorage is the most refined version of this system: this time, there was not even a signed text. Just a meeting, non-public proposals, and ten months of narrative construction. This means that the next time Trump and Putin meet — if that occurs — discussions will be obscured by the question of whether post-summit statements constitute "agreements." Russia has created a precedent according to which any high-level discussion can be retrospectively transformed into a binding framework. This is a permanent diplomatic weapon.

What Ukraine's allies must demand now

The lesson of Anchorage for Ukraine's allies is clear: any negotiation on Ukraine must be conducted with maximum transparency, with Ukraine at the table, with public texts rather than private understandings, and with verification mechanisms that prevent the post-hoc construction of diplomatic fictions. Bilateral American-Russian discussions on Ukraine — without Kyiv's participation — create exactly the conditions that allow Moscow to exploit ambiguities.

The American positioning as expressed by Rubio on June 25, 2026 — support for Ukrainian sovereignty, disavowal of a fictitious Anchorage agreement — is a foundation. But a foundation is not enough. What is needed is a diplomatic architecture that prevents the repetition of the Anchorage operation: no more bilateral summits without transparency, no more silence on Russian claims of fictitious agreements, and the systematic inclusion of Ukraine in any diplomatic process concerning it. This is a minimum requirement. And Zelensky has been stating it for a long time.

Ukrainian-Russian negotiations — what has really been blocking things for four years

The fundamental problem: mutually exclusive red lines

The war in Ukraine has lasted four years not because negotiators lack imagination, but because the core positions of Kyiv and Moscow are mutually exclusive. Russia demands recognition of its territorial conquests, Ukraine's permanent neutrality, and lasting limitations on its military capacity. Ukraine demands the Russian withdrawal from occupied territories, respect for its full sovereignty, and solid Western security guarantees — including a perspective of NATO membership. These two sets of conditions are incompatible. No agreement can satisfy both simultaneously. This is the reality that all intermediaries — Turkey, Israel, Gulf countries — discovered when attempting to play mediator.

The Anchorage fiction aggravated this reality by adding an additional layer of ambiguity: if Moscow can claim that Washington already "accepted" elements of its position in a bilateral meeting, Ukrainian negotiators arrive at every negotiating table with the feeling that their most important allies may have conceded something behind their backs. This structural distrust between Kyiv and Washington — fed by ten months of post-Anchorage ambiguity — is one of the most lasting legacies of this diplomatic episode.

What a real peace process should include

Experts in post-conflict negotiation — notably those at the United States Institute of Peace and the Carnegie Institute — identify several minimum conditions for a peace process to produce a lasting outcome in Ukraine. First, Ukraine must be at the table: no agreement imposed on Kyiv without its participation will be respected. Second, security guarantees must be concrete and verifiable — not verbal assurances like those in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which Russia violated in 2014 and 2022. Third, verification mechanisms must be robust, with an international presence capable of documenting violations.

None of these conditions is present in the current framework. American-Russian bilateral discussions exclude Kyiv. Western security guarantees remain vague. And the verification process imagined in preliminary discussions is insufficient for a country the size of Ukraine with a border of several thousand kilometers with Russia. Rubio's June 25 declaration is a step toward greater transparency — but the distance between a disavowal of a fictitious agreement and a credible peace architecture remains considerable.

Ukraine in 2026 — a nation resisting and waiting for a just peace

Ukrainian resilience in the face of Russian attrition warfare

While diplomats debate the definitions of Anchorage, Ukraine continues to fight. Its armed forces hold front lines under constant artillery and drone pressure. Its civilian population endures power cuts, infrastructure destruction, internal displacement. Its economy runs in permanent war mode with a budget deficit partly covered by Western aid, notably the 90-billion-euro loan from the European Union. Despite all this, Ukraine has not capitulated. It has not accepted Russian conditions. It maintains its choice of European and Euro-Atlantic integration.

This resilience comes at a colossal human and economic cost. According to estimates by the World Bank and the Ukrainian government, rebuilding Ukraine after the end of the war will require several hundred billion dollars. Its human losses number in the tens of thousands of fallen soldiers, to which must be added the civilian casualties documented by the United Nations. Millions of Ukrainians have lived outside their country since 2022. The social cost of this war will continue to be measured for generations. But Zelensky and Ukrainian society maintain that this cost is lower than the cost of capitulation.

What the international community owes Ukraine in 2026

Rubio's clarification on Anchorage is a signal that Washington recognizes the importance of diplomatic transparency. But Ukraine needs more than a clarification — it needs a firm and lasting commitment from the international community on its future security. Credible security guarantees, reconstruction funding, maintaining sanctions against Russia, and support for European integration are the four pillars of a concrete commitment. Without these pillars, diplomatic declarations remain mere words.

Europe has shown the way with the 90-billion-euro loan and the opening of Cluster 1 accession negotiations. The United States showed the way with Rubio's statement on Anchorage and the American repositioning in favor of Ukrainian sovereignty. This is not enough to end the war. But it is the minimum foundation of a credible Western commitment — the one that Ukraine deserves after four years of resistance against a nuclear power.

Conclusion: The silence that cost ten months

Rubio is right — he should have said so in September 2025

Marco Rubio's declaration of June 25, 2026 is factual, precise and necessary. It says what has been true since August 15, 2025: there was no agreement in Anchorage. There were proposals, discussions, an atmosphere that Trump judged positive. Not an agreement. This clarification should have been made immediately after the summit — not to embarrass Russia, but to prevent ten months of fictional construction from polluting the diplomatic process and weakening Kyiv's positions.

The price of this ten-month silence is difficult to quantify precisely, but it is real. Ukraine's allies had doubts. Non-aligned countries heard the Russian version of Anchorage without an American correction. Ukrainian negotiators had to manage additional ambiguity in an already extraordinarily difficult context. And Russia was able to claim for ten months to be the party respecting commitments that no one had genuinely made. The truth spoken now is welcome. But the truth spoken sooner would have better served the cause of real peace.

The next Trump-Putin meeting — if it happens

If Trump and Putin meet again, the question of an immediate and transparent account will be crucial. The Anchorage precedent must serve as an operational lesson: any Kremlin statement about what was "accepted" during a meeting must be disavowed or confirmed immediately by Washington — not ten months later. Otherwise, the mechanics of ghost diplomacy will begin again. And Ukraine, already exhausted by four years of war, cannot afford a second Anchorage.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

My angle and my biases

This opinion piece is pro-Ukraine and critical of the Russian administration. I consider Russia's invocation of the "Anchorage agreements" as a deliberate diplomatic manipulation, not a good-faith misinterpretation. This judgment shapes my analysis. I acknowledge that there is uncertainty about exactly what was said in the room at Anchorage — Rubio is the only member of the American delegation to have spoken publicly on the subject.

What I do not know

I did not have access to Witkoff's proposals brought to Moscow before the summit. I do not know whether some of these proposals were effectively problematic for Kyiv as some analysts suggest. I do not know whether Trump was aware of Russia's claims about Anchorage and deliberately chose not to deny them, or whether it was an internal coordination failure within the administration.

Sources

Primary sources

RFE/RL — Rubio-Lavrov: rift reveals Moscow's responsibility-transfer strategy — June 26, 2026

1Lurer — Rubio: "No agreement in Alaska, only a proposal" — June 26, 2026

RBC Ukraine — Rubio on Anchorage: "only proposals, not agreements" — June 25, 2026

Ukrainska Pravda — Lavrov: "sentiment" of changing American approach, commitment to Anchorage agreements — June 19, 2026

Secondary sources

CNN — Analysis: the "Anchorage formula" — how Russia invented an agreement — January 27, 2026

Wikipedia — 2025 Russia-US summit, Anchorage, no public agreement, "spirit of Anchorage" — August 2025

TASS — Rubio: no final agreement reached in Anchorage — June 25, 2026