Russia, explained.

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska (Daniel Torok/Official White House Photo)

Anchorage and Washington: Implications for ending Russia’s war against Ukraine

Diplomatic efforts have failed to shift Russia's surrender-or-nothing stance.

Mark Edele

26 August 20254 min read

Anchorage and Washington were fun. Red carpets, family photos, press conferences with and without questions allowed, including those about a president’s outfits, statements about imminent peace, much punditry and more speculation.

What has changed? Nothing.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is ready for talks, President Vladimir Putin does not want to meet him, and President Donald Trump changes his mind nearly daily: on cease fires, peace negotiations, sanctions, and who is to blame that this war continues. It should just stop, he decrees.

On the ground, nobody is winning the war. Russia is inching forward bit by bit at a pace that will allow it to take the rest of Donbas in about four-and-a-half years. Once that is accomplished it can continue its advance and take the rest of Ukraine in another eight decades. All of that is presuming current rates of advance and the ability to sustain the current horrendous losses.

Ukraine keeps resisting, continues to struggle with insufficient support from its democratic friends, and has to worry about the fickle Americans. It continues to suffer from personnel shortages and has to endure savage aerial attacks on its cities and civilian infrastructure.

Russia is negotiating not for peace but for Ukraine’s surrender.

Russia’s strategy continues to be: outlast the democratic world and hope that sooner or later Ukraine will crack.

The best chance of ending this war remains pouring in massive military aid to Ukraine and where possible increase the pressure on Russia through sanctions, including secondary ones. The frontline needs to be stabilised and fortified, the skies secured. The problem for the strategy will continue to be the foreign policy chaos that reigns in Washington, and the insufficient production capacity of Europe and other middle powers. But Ukraine produces already 40 per cent of its own arms, and as far as drones are concerned, it is self-sufficient. With the right financial backing it could expand its already impressive capacity even further.

What about diplomacy? There was no lack of it, long before Anchorage. In 2021, after Putin had amassed troops at Ukraine’s border, he was rewarded with a summit in June with President Joe Biden in Geneva. Later in the year, as we know now from Bob Woodward’s reporting, the United States received incontrovertible evidence that Russia intended to invade Ukraine. In response, the US administration tried feverishly to create diplomatic off ramps for Putin. Russia issued an ultimatum in response on 17 December that amounted to accepting the former Soviet sphere of influence as Russia’s. On 21 January 2022, the United States tried again to open diplomatic channels. Talks between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov ended with an agreement to continue talking. A little more than a month later, on 24 February, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Gathering in the East Room (Daniel Torok/Official White House Photo)

Negotiations started while Russia still had the whip hand in February and March. The Russian position was an escalation of the December 2021 ultimatum. Had Ukraine accepted Russia’s proposals, “it would have essentially led to the country becoming a virtual province of Russia – led by a pro-Russian government and banned from seeking alliances with Western countries,” as one specialist has argued. In essence, this continues to be Russia’s position today: it is negotiating not for peace but for Ukraine’s surrender.

The one time when diplomacy was successful, at least for a while, is also the most instructive: the Black Sea Grain Initiative of July 2022. Brokered by Türkiye and the United Nations, it is usually seen as removing Russia’s naval blockade of Ukraine by peaceful means. The reality was more complex, as a team of legal scholars argue in an important 2024 analysis. First, it obliged Russia to no more than simply accepting a restricted set of the international rules of warfare: civilian shipping should be free to navigate under most conditions, even in wartime. The only measure which went beyond extant rules was that port facilities were also exempt from attack – a provision Russia immediately broke with impunity. In exchange, Russia received an easing of sanctions. Moreover, it only became willing to consider this diplomatic offering when its ability to enforce a blockade had been eroded through military pressure: in particular the sinking of the flagship cruiser Moskva on 14 April 2022 and the recapture, after heavy coastal artillery barrage, of Snake Island (made famous for the defiant early war slogan suggesting what a Russian military vessel should do to itself.)

Once it was no longer factually able to enforce an illegal blockade, Russia came to the negotiating table to reap the benefits. It tried this trick again in negotiations to renew the deal in 2023, where it demanded further sanctions relief. As none was forthcoming, Russia pulled out of the deal. However, this no longer mattered much because Ukraine had meanwhile created facts on the sea: armed with increasing numbers of anti-ship missiles, air-borne and sea-borne drones, and coastal artillery, it could enforce its own “humanitarian corridor,” by denying Russian military vessels use of the western Black Sea and threatening retaliation against Russia’s own civilian vessels. Hence, the international rules of the sea returned under the protection of deterrence.

The implications should be self-evident.

About the author

Mark Edele

Mark Edele is Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne and one of the editors of Elements in Soviet and Post-Soviet History (Cambridge University Press).

Topics

Russia Ukraine