Moscow- Russia and the United States have put the final nail in the coffin of the peace process in Ukraine. The negotiations, stalled since February due to the war in Iran, will have to start from scratch and, likely, with European participation.
Both the Kremlin and the White House have publicly turned their backs on the commitments reached a year ago by the leaders of both countries, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the United States’ Donald Trump, in the capital of Alaska (Anchorage).
What was for many months the only glimmer of hope for a cessation of hostilities has lost all validity, largely because the Ukrainians have notably improved their positions, not so much on the front as in the Russian rear, which has not gone unnoticed by Trump.
The spirit of Anchorage, in Alaska
That is what the Russians called it, aware that the summit in Anchorage (Alaska) broke Putin’s isolation, as he had not traveled to the West since the war began in February 2022.
The “understandings” reached by the Russians and Americans were never made public, although the press has always spoken of Moscow’s commitment to stop the fighting if the Ukrainians voluntarily abandoned the Donbas.
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The Kremlin did not want to reveal what it had committed to, since giving up the northern third of the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia could not be well-received by the most nationalist sectors.
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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio himself assured Congress in June that the military campaign in Ukraine turned out to be a strategic failure for the Kremlin and that Russia would never win the war.
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The Kremlin sensed that what was agreed upon at the summit was a dead letter, so it began to insist that, although Russia remains “open” to negotiations and considers it a “preferable” path, it will continue the so-called special military operation until “final victory.”
The death certificate
Rubio and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, signed the death certificate of Anchorage this week in Manila during their first meeting since September 2025, held on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers’ summit.
Rubio, who did not renounce the White House’s role as mediator, nevertheless admitted that a future peace agreement requires “new ideas,” as the previous ones are obsolete.
“Certainly, that (Anchorage) was not acceptable for Ukraine at the time, and I don’t think it will be now. In fact, it will be even less so,” he stated.
Lavrov picked up the gauntlet, openly labeled the “Anchorage agreements” a “failure” for the first time, and added: “We must know who is to blame.”
The U.S. said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would do what Trump proposed. Well, it didn’t work,” Lavrov explained.
“This arrogant rejection (…) of the American proposal is largely due to the fact that Zelensky is receiving a massive supply of weapons and huge quantities of drones, which he uses to destabilize the Russian Federation by attacking civilians and civilian targets,” he noted.
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He added that “a significant part of this support” is U.S. aid itself, which includes intelligence backing and the Starlink satellite network.
The zero point
The U.S. admits that its mediation has not succeeded and that it will be necessary to return to the starting point. The process began in February 2025 with the first visit to the Kremlin by White House negotiator Steve Witkoff, which would be followed by half a dozen trips, the last one last January.
Afterwards, there were several rounds of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations—the first since 2022—but they resulted in nothing more than exchanges of prisoners of war and the bodies of those fallen at the front. The territorial dispute was not even addressed.
The Kremlin highlighted on Friday the “dualism” of the US Administration: the Americans “are sincere” in trying to achieve a peaceful settlement, but they continue to “pump” weapons into Ukraine.
Pending the conflict in Iran
All in all, he expressed his confidence that Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, would “free themselves” from their obligations in the Middle East and present those “new proposals” to Putin.
Meanwhile, Zelensky has managed to fend off pressure from Trump and involve the Europeans in the peace process.
In addition, Kyiv has resorted to massive attacks against refineries and e-commerce warehouses, which have caused a serious fuel crisis and panic among its customers.
The Western press asserts that, for this reason, Putin has ruled out any territorial concessions in future negotiations, something that makes peace further away than ever since Trump returned to the White House.
