As war stalls, Putin concedes he never cut a deal with Trump in Alaska

For months, high-ranking Russian officials insisted that a path to ending the war in Ukraine – largely on Moscow’s maximalist terms – had been decided at a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump last August in Anchorage. Only Ukraine’s intransigence stood as an obstacle.

But that narrative has unraveled – perhaps because the only way to get the United States to help broker a new deal is admitting there never was a previous one.

In recent days, three top Russian officials accused the White House of not honoring the Alaska agreement. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov even speculated that the summit was a U.S. “ploy to buy time to rearm the Kyiv regime.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, however, pushed back. “If there had been an agreement, we would have had an end of the war,” Rubio told reporters.

“Russia wants the entirety of Donetsk to be turned over to them, among some other things,” he said, explaining Russia’s demand for more Ukrainian territory.

After days of back-and-forth, Putin conceded the point, saying on Sunday that “there were indeed no agreements reached in Anchorage.”

“The spirit of Anchorage – although it wasn’t expressed in any formal documents, and no one put any signatures down – in Anchorage we discussed certain possibilities for ending the crisis in Ukraine,” Putin told a state television reporter Sunday. “And the compromises discussed were precisely the proposals the American side made to us.”

The contradictions started in Alaska immediately after the summit. Putin said an agreement that will “pave the path toward peace in Ukraine” was reached, while Trump said that while the meeting was “extremely productive … there’s no deal until there’s a deal.” Trump also told Fox News afterward that it was “up to Zelensky” now to get a deal done, referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Russian leader’s decision now effectively to bury the Alaska summit, which the Kremlin and its propagandists had mythologized as a turning point, comes as Russian forces are largely stalled on the battlefield in Ukraine – a sharp change from the previous four summers when they made gains.

Instead, the skies over Russia and the Ukrainian territory it occupies are increasingly crowded with advanced Ukrainian drones, signaling a new phase in which Russia is playing technological catch-up and regular Russian citizens are feeling the war intrude on their lives with gasoline shortages and disruptions to summer travel, including to occupied Crimea.

Russian political analysts have interpreted the indirect spat between Rubio and Lavrov over the alleged deal as a sign that Ukraine has convinced Trump it can keep fighting – and that it can pose a serious threat to Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, rather than surrendering the Donbas region, as Russia has demanded.

Trump probably arrived in Anchorage believing that Ukraine’s defeat was inevitable and that the sooner it accepted terms, the better for everyone, Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent foreign policy analyst who advises the Kremlin, wrote in an op-ed in a Russian publication.

“The goal of Kyiv and the collective Brussels was to convince Trump that the belief in Ukraine’s inevitable defeat was mistaken,” Lukyanov wrote. “Ten months after the Anchorage summit, they succeeded in persuading him.”

Since Alaska, no major breakthrough has materialized in Russia’s favor, Europe so far has managed to sustain its military and economic aid to Ukraine, and Trump has become distracted by Iran.

“Diplomacy in the midst of hostilities is shaped by their outcome,” Lukyanov wrote. “If the balance of power – or the perception thereof – shifts, the understandings reached at an earlier stage lose their validity.”

Ukraine’s push to impose a “logistical lockdown” on Crimea and Kyiv’s growing capability to strike deep inside Russia seem to be part of a 40-day blitz declared by Zelensky to “influence” Moscow to end the war.

Continuing that pressure, Ukraine overnight launched dozens of drones at the Moscow region and struck Russia’s Dubna satellite communications center north of the capital. Zelensky said ​Russia uses the Dubna site for reconnaissance and coordination of its military activities in Ukraine.

Andrei Vorobyov, governor of the Moscow region, confirmed the attack had occurred but said that an “administrative building was damaged by drone debris.”

Amid chaotic scenes in Crimea, the Russia-installed authorities imposed a state of emergency in response to strikes on highways and bridges. There have also been blackouts that have prompted many summer visitors to return home.

“He’s holding his own at least,” Trump said of Zelensky last week, speaking to reporters at the White House. “A lot of people dying on both sides, but I think he’s doing pretty well. You have to say he’s courageous, he’s got great equipment, he’s got great men, he’s got fighters.”

Ukraine seems to have scaled drone production to a level that can sustain strikes on Russian cities hundreds of miles from the border and that keeps the frontline kill zone stable. This means that ground action is drying up.

“The war has markedly changed this year,” said Ruslan Leviev, an analyst with the Conflict Intelligence Team, a group that uses open-source data to track the Russian military.

“It’s hard to say the battle initiative is on the Ukrainian side,” Leviev said, “but time is on Ukraine’s side – more problems keep arising for Russia, economically, politically and militarily, and it’s all adding up.”

Russian budget data indicates that its military recruited 71,216 men during the first quarter of 2026, compared with 89,601 over the same period last year, according to Janis Kluge, a Russia expert at the Berlin-based German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

Recruitment stabilized somewhat in the second quarter, returning to around 30,000 contracts per month. But local media reports suggest the overall stream of recruits has slowed compared with previous years as the pool of men drawn by the enormous pay packages that eclipse regional Russian salaries appears to be shrinking.

Rumors have circulated that Russia may declare a fresh mobilization after key parliamentary elections in the fall – the first since the war began – but politically that move could prove extremely costly for the Kremlin. The “partial mobilization” in 2022 drove tens of thousands of men to flee Russia. After four years of war, and mounting economic strain, the mood has soured considerably.

Leviev and other analysts said that they doubt Moscow would call for full mobilization, since this would require significant financial resources to set up new formations, and train and equip them, and that such a move fundamentally wouldn’t unfreeze the line of contact. “At this pace, the war on the ground looks to us as a dead end,” Leviev said.

This poses several challenges for Russia.

Russia still holds an advantage in manpower, conventional arms and ballistic missiles, which it continues to use against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. But Ukraine’s relentless drone campaign, especially its use of medium-range drones, has chipped away at this advantage, complicating frontline logistics and driving up the costs for Moscow of supplying the front.

Russia’s flagship air defense systems were designed for high-altitude targets like jets and ballistic missiles, not slow, low-flying drones. Interceptor missiles also cost many times more than the drones they shoot down, draining stocks at a rate Western officials have said may be unsustainable.

In his remarks Sunday, Putin commented on the deteriorating situation in Crimea and the wider fuel shortage in Russia after weeks of silence.

Addressing Ukraine’s drone campaign, Putin said that Russia needed to “significantly ramp up production of air defense systems.” He also pledged to ensure the supply of fuel to Crimea by land and sea but did not say how this would be accomplished.

Putin also asserted that Kyiv had put forward what he called “new proposals” to curtail hostilities in four regions of eastern Ukraine – Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk – and agree to mutually halt long-range strikes.

Putin, however, cast the offer as a distraction that would allow Ukraine to redeploy units from other regions to these four areas, relieving pressure along the nearly 800-mile frontline. He reiterated that Moscow aims to fight on.

“We have some certainty regarding the challenges facing Putin, but what we can expect from him in response to these challenges remains unclear,” said Vladimir Pastukhov, a Russian political scientist and honorary senior research fellow at University College London.

According to Pastukhov, Putin has several options to escalate the war, all fraught with risk. These include an attack on a NATO nation in the Baltics, the detonation of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine or a mass mobilization of Russian soldiers. Moscow could also adopt a hybrid strategy, potentially striking European military facilities supporting Ukraine.

That would effectively be a limited, undeclared war on Europe, testing Trump’s loyalty to NATO allies.

Putin could also pressure its ally Belarus to allow Russian forces to attack Ukraine from its territory, opening a new northern front.

Putin on Sunday said Russia was expecting a resumption of U.S.-led peace talks and a visit to Moscow by U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – once the “hot ​phase” of the Iran war is resolved.

Lukyanov, the analyst, said Russia believes that Trump’s position on the war in Ukraine will shift again – as it has many times. “But first,” he wrote, “the White House must be brought to the understanding that a military victory for Russia’s adversaries is impossible.”