Russian President Vladimir Putin's longtime foreign-policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, disavowed the term "spirit of Anchorage". The Kremlin has used it for many months to suggest a US-Russia understanding emerged from last August's Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, the Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Max Seddon reported on X.
In October 2025, when Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov publicly said the "momentum from Anchorage has been largely exhausted," Ushakov was the senior Kremlin figure who corrected him. Later, Ryabkov reversed himself and declared "there is no alternative to the spirit of Anchorage," Meduza documented in a February investigation.
"Maybe the spirit of Beijing exists. I don't know about the spirit of Anchorage, I never used this phrase," Ushakov told the state-television journalist.
What was said, and which summit did it refer to?
The Trump-Putin meeting in Anchorage on 15 August 2025 ended without a Ukraine deal, but Moscow subsequently promoted "the spirit of Anchorage" to suggest a "whole set of understandings" had been reached, as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it, declining to elaborate.
Meduza's investigation found that the phrase "exists only in Moscow's vocabulary", as it has not been used by the Trump administration to describe the summit's outcome.
Ushakov, 78, has been Putin's principal foreign-policy aide since 2012 and a key Kremlin interlocutor with the Trump administration through the Anchorage process.
"Spirit of Anchorage" project is quietly retiring
The substitution carries content. Putin traveled to Beijing for his 25th visit, days after President Donald Trump's own visit to China.
Earlier, reports said that three European intelligence agencies and documents the agency reviewed indicate China secretly trained about 200 Russian military personnel on Chinese soil in late 2025, with some returning to fight in Ukraine.
The Russia-China "no limits" partnership, declared days before the 2022 war, has remained Moscow's anchor orientation throughout the period the Kremlin was simultaneously promoting the prospect of an American thaw.
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The Anchorage narrative has, in the meantime, produced no Ukraine deal, no substantive normalization of US-Russia relations, and a steadily escalating Russian-Belarusian pressure campaign on the EU's eastern flank.
The "spirit of Anchorage" project, sustained by the Kremlin for nine months, appears to be quietly retiring.
