Anchorage like Minsk?
Almost a year on from the meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska, disillusionment is growing in Moscow — according to Lavrov, Russia has been deceived, just as it was with the Minsk agreements
Guest post by Roberto Iannuzzi, originally published in Italian on his Substack.
At the recent NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, the American president Donald Trump had unusually warm words for his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.
The occupant of the White House expressed his support for Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian territory, stating that “it is an escalation, but it is also an escalation that could help bring about a conclusion” to the conflict.
The friendly meeting between the two presidents stood in stark contrast to the “Oval Office row” that had erupted between them at the beginning of 2025, when Trump had only recently begun his second term.
The openly pro-Ukrainian stance displayed by the American leader marks the failure of the diplomatic efforts launched with the meeting between Trump and the Russian president Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, in August 2025.
Those efforts, aimed at reaching a negotiated solution to the conflict, had met with firm opposition from Kyiv and the European countries, as well as from Republican and Democratic members of the US Congress.
Lavrov and the Minsk comparison
A few weeks ago, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov stated that he did not want “to even think that Alaska, just like the actions of the Europeans, was conceived to buy time in order to rearm the Kyiv regime. […] But in reality that is exactly how things went”.
In speaking of “the actions of the Europeans”, Lavrov was referring to the statements made by the former German chancellor Angela Merkel in a 2022 interview, according to which the Minsk agreements had been a stratagem to allow Ukraine to rearm.
Negotiated by France and Germany together with Ukraine and Russia in 2014 and then in 2015, the Minsk agreements were meant to ensure that the Donbas would remain under Ukrainian sovereignty while guaranteeing the region broad autonomy.
Merkel’s revelations suggested that the Minsk agreements were in fact a deliberate deception designed to induce Russia to accept a ceasefire with the promise of a peaceful resolution of the conflict, buying Ukraine time to strengthen its armed forces.
This thesis was confirmed by the former French president François Hollande, who had negotiated the agreements alongside Merkel.
Interviewed by the Kyiv Independent, Hollande maintained that “yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point”.
He added: “Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture. Indeed, the Ukrainian army is completely different from that of 2014. It is better trained and better equipped. It is to the credit of the Minsk agreements that they gave the Ukrainian army this opportunity”.
Petro Poroshenko himself, the Ukrainian president who had negotiated the agreements, told the Financial Times that Ukraine “had no armed forces at all” and that “the great diplomatic success” of the agreements was that “we kept Russia away from our borders — not from our borders, but away from a full-scale war”.
According to the biography of Putin written by the journalist Philip Short, Poroshenko said he had signed the Minsk agreements “because it was the only way to stop the fighting, but he knew they would never be implemented”.
Putin’s indecision?
Last June, then, Lavrov compared the consequences of the Alaska meeting between Trump and Putin to what had happened with the Minsk agreements. In other words, according to Lavrov, Russia had once again been deceived.
In reality, the understanding reached at Anchorage was even weaker than the Minsk agreements. According to Russian sources, it envisaged that Trump would press Zelensky to withdraw from the Donbas, and in exchange Putin would accept a ceasefire.
In practice, Trump never persuaded Zelensky to withdraw, while at the same time he sought to push Putin to declare a ceasefire even before the Ukrainian withdrawal — something the Russian president never accepted.
From Moscow’s point of view, a mere ceasefire would have produced a frozen conflict that would not have resolved the root causes of the war, once again allowing Ukraine to rearm and resume hostilities at a later stage.
Despite this — according to the critics of the Kremlin’s official line, whose voices are multiplying in Moscow — Putin continued his dialogue with the White House even when it was by then evident that the latter was exerting no pressure whatsoever on the government in Kyiv.
Moreover, these critics argue, Putin kept the war effort in Ukraine within the confines of the so-called “Special Military Operation” without proceeding to an escalation, even when it was by then clear that the whole of Europe was mobilising in support of Kyiv and that Washington was continuing to back the Ukrainian army at the logistical and intelligence level.
Uninterrupted support for Ukraine
That the White House supports Ukraine at the intelligence level is confirmed by recent revelations in the Financial Times, according to which the United States has helped Ukrainian long-range drones evade Moscow’s air defences and strike deep into Russian territory, in particular with an unprecedented wave of attacks on oil refineries.
In the first six months of 2026, Russian refineries were reportedly struck at least 194 times — a staggering increase on the same period the previous year.
But as early as December of last year, the New York Times revealed that, although the partnership between Washington and Kyiv was officially strained owing to America’s supposed willingness to negotiate with Moscow, the CIA had continued to maintain its presence in Ukraine and had helped orchestrate a campaign of drone attacks against Russian oil infrastructure.
Trump is even said to have praised these attacks, claiming that they gave him bargaining power in negotiations with Russia.
Even when the Pentagon decided briefly to suspend intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March 2025, the CIA continued to supply data to Kyiv, in particular on Russian operations on Ukrainian territory.
The CIA was also authorised to assist Ukrainian drone attacks against the so-called “shadow fleet” of Russian oil tankers in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.
The fact that Washington was continuing to provide Ukraine with the intelligence needed to strike Russian energy infrastructure had already been confirmed by the Financial Times in October 2025 — that is, less than two months after the Anchorage meeting.
The data supplied by the US included route planning, altitude, timing and the details needed to evade Russian air defences, according to American sources cited by the newspaper.
Those sources maintain that Washington also helped determine the priority of the targets to be struck. The paper reports that Trump secretly backed Kyiv’s strategy of attacking Russia’s energy infrastructure “to make them [the Russians] feel the pain” and soften their negotiating position.
Coercive diplomacy
The United States, then, never became an impartial mediator in the conflict despite Trump’s declarations to that effect, having instead remained a co-belligerent party at Ukraine’s side.
From what has been set out above, it emerges that in the aftermath of the Anchorage meeting, the Trump administration decided to adopt a “coercive diplomacy” towards Moscow, not unlike that adopted with Iran, in order to push the Kremlin into accepting a ceasefire even in the absence of a Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donbas.
That strategy included support for the Ukrainian campaign of drone attacks on Russian territory, the imposition of sanctions (also decided in October 2025) on the two Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil, pressure on India to stop buying Russian oil and even the possibility of supplying Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles.
The Russians, however, showed no sign of yielding to intimidation. Then, at the end of 2025, an event as mysterious as it was disturbing took place.
The attack on Putin’s residence
On December 29, the Russian foreign ministry denounced an overnight attack — which it described as “terrorist” — in which a swarm of long-range drones (91, to be precise, according to the statement) had targeted the Russian president’s residence on Lake Valdai, in the Novgorod region.
All the drones had been shot down by Russian air defence systems, the statement declared, adding however that such a reckless action would not go unanswered.
The morning after the attack, Putin personally called Trump to protest at what had happened.
Hours later, questioned by journalists about the episode, Trump replied: “I don’t like it, I don’t like it […]. President Putin told me. Early this morning he said he had been attacked. That’s not good. That’s not good... This is not the right time to be doing any of that… I was very angry about it”.
We have seen how Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory in fact take place with the direct support of American intelligence.
A New York Times article entitled “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine”, dating back to March 2025, revealed how the Pentagon and the CIA had been authorised as far back as president Joe Biden, Trump’s predecessor, to carry out strikes deep inside Russian territory.
A senior officer of a European intelligence service, interviewed by the paper, stated that the Americans “are now part of the ‘kill chain’” in Ukraine. The Russians are obviously aware of this.
At the time of the attack on the presidential residence on Lake Valdai, Moscow was convinced that US intelligence had taken part in the operation.
“I said straight away that it is impossible [to carry out this attack] without the support of [Western] intelligence services, first and foremost the CIA”, declared Aleksei Chepa, deputy chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Duma, the Russian parliament.
A few days later, the CIA claimed that the attack had never taken place — or at least that the drones which had flown over Russia that night had not been headed for Lake Valdai.
Further irritated, the Russians cited the published photos and videos of the wreckage of the downed drones in support of their claim. On January 2, 2026, they summoned a US military attaché in Moscow for a formal meeting.
During the meeting, a senior Russian officer handed the American attaché what he identified as the navigation processor recovered from one of the downed drones, urging American specialists to decrypt its contents.
On January 5, after receiving briefings from the CIA, Trump said he did not believe that Ukraine or the CIA had attempted to kill Putin at his residence on Lake Valdai.
Yet it was precisely to this attack that Zelensky referred in a provocative open letter addressed to Putin at the beginning of June: “We often hear it said that you are comfortable in this war. Not, of course, when it comes to the security of your residence at Valdai or your parade in Moscow. Your own life is precious to you”.
An implacable adversary
Meanwhile, two days before Trump’s denial of January 5, American special forces had seized the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a raid on Caracas that had left around a hundred dead.
A few weeks later, on February 28, Israel would assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei — once again with the help of the CIA.
The Ukrainian attacks on the early-warning radars of Russia’s system for detecting potential nuclear threats, and on its fleet of strategic bombers (a key element of Moscow’s nuclear deterrence triad) — operations likewise conducted with the probable support of Western intelligence — constitute a further alarm bell for the Kremlin.
The recent failure of the Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Iran confirms, in the eyes of non-Western leaderships, that for Washington the only negotiation worth pursuing is one that leads to the adversary’s surrender.
The decapitation operations carried out against the governing leaderships of Iran and Venezuela constitute a warning to Moscow and Beijing, one which seems to indicate that the United States accepts neither compromise nor arrangements for coexistence with its adversaries.
In Moscow, many are by now convinced that the Anchorage overture was yet another deception. The path of negotiation appears closed off. What remains to be decided is how to confront the growing attacks conducted by the West against Russia by Ukrainian hand.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
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