The end of the US-Russia detente?

As Washington escalates its economic war against Russia, emboldening the more hawkish elements within the Russian establishments, peace appears as elusive as ever

I’ve written for UnHerd about why Ukraine peace talks aren’t going anywhere, the US’s escalating economic war on Russia, Lavrov lashing out at Trump — and why the current deadlock is emboldening the more hawkish elements within the Russian security establishment.

Since last August’s meeting in Alaska between Putin and Trump, Russian officials have frequently invoked the “spirit of Anchorage” to describe the framework of understanding purportedly reached between the two leaders. In practice, we can surmise that this sought to reconcile Trump’s transactional instincts, in the form of economic arrangements beneficial to US companies and Trump’s own prestige, with Putin’s insistence on the need to address the “primary roots of the conflict”: namely the need for a new security arrangement in Europe. This agreement, however, always rested on very shaky grounds, precisely because the two parties invested Anchorage with two very different meanings. From Moscow’s standpoint, what is at stake is nothing less than a fundamental renegotiation of the rules underpinning European and global security; Washington, by contrast, sees the matter in narrower terms: a specific conflict to be managed and contained, without disturbing the broader structure of international power that suits Washington just fine.

Russia has sought to manage this tension through what might be called a double-track approach. On the one hand, it has tasked Kirill Dmitriev — the Harvard-educated financier who heads Russia’s sovereign wealth fund — with negotiating a large-scale economic deal with the US. Meanwhile, senior diplomats, above all the veteran foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, have worked in parallel on the broader geopolitical settlement. This approach has so far failed to yield concrete results, prompting the diplomatic track to ratchet up its rhetorical pressure on Washington. The clearest sign of this came in a recent interview in which Lavrov spoke of the Trump administration in unprecedentedly harsh terms.

Lavrov openly challenged the idea that the US is working towards the cooperative framework meant to emerge from the Anchorage talks. He claimed that Russia had accepted Washington’s proposals on resolving the war in Ukraine, only to find the US backing away from them in practice. “They made an offer, we agreed — the problem should have been resolved. Having accepted their proposals, we believed we had fulfilled the task of resolving the Ukrainian issue and could move on to full-scale, broad, mutually beneficial cooperation. But in practice everything looks the opposite”.

Lavrov accused the US of not only failing to take concrete steps to rein in Kyiv — most likely an implicit reference to Ukraine’s continued drone strikes on Russian territory, which could not be carried out without US intelligence and satellite support — but, more fundamentally, of actively intensifying its economic war on Moscow. He cited new sanctions, Washington’s campaign against Russian tankers in international waters, and efforts to pressure India and other partners into abandoning Russian oil. “This is pure ‘Bidenism’”, Lavrov remarked, offering it as proof that the US’s true objective remains that of “achieving economic domination”.

At the same time, Lavrov framed all this as part of a broader “neo-imperial” strategy on Washington’s part that extends well beyond Russia. “The West,” he said, “is reluctant to relinquish its formerly dominant positions… With the arrival of the Trump administration, this struggle to constrain competitors has become particularly obvious and explicit” — a reference to the White House’s hyper-bellicose posture over recent months, including the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the escalation of US pressure on Cuba, and the growing threats against Iran.

It remains unclear whether Lavrov’s remarks signal a genuine rift — within the Kremlin’s corridors of power and more broadly between Moscow and Washington — or whether they are simply a manifestation of the double-track approach: pairing backroom diplomacy with calculated public pressure. What is clear, though, is that the current deadlock is emboldening the more hawkish elements within the Russian security establishment.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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