WHY THE "SPIRIT OF ANCHORAGE" DIED, AND WHAT "ANCHORAGE 2.0" MIGHT LOOK LIKE. HOW THE CITIZENS OF GLUPOV* WERE ENDING THE WAR.
A Five-Part Essay
PART III. A HISTORY OF SQUANDERED WISDOM
But Putin, too, has plenty to think about today. When Putin tells the military that "sooner or later this war will end in Russia's victory," the operative words are precisely "sooner or later." Sooner or later everything ends – but people, for some reason, want to live here and now. And so Putin's own elites are unhappy that he let slip the chance for normalisation that Trump offered. In substance, at their meeting in Omsk, Tokayev was simply voicing to Putin the opinion of his own inner circle – an opinion that has long since crystallised into a public demand for de-escalation.
What's more, this muffled grumbling among Kremlin elites is even more palpable than their original discontent over Putin having started the war in the first place. Back then, at least, the future hadn't seemed so uncertain, and they had trusted Putin's judgment – expressed, as always, in Medvedev's grotesque idiom: they'll thrash about and calm down. Alas, that judgment turned out to be mere self-regard, and self-regard not only flatters no one but ruins plenty of lives besides. It was precisely this self-regard that tripped Putin up again a year ago, when he decided to raise the stakes in his game with Trump to "all of Donbas" and proved unable to bring to a graceful close a war that has turned out, whichever way you look at it, to be his greatest geopolitical blunder.
Trump, in Anchorage, was in fact quite generous (especially by European standards) and laid a decent offer on the table – terms, I'd even say, above Russia's actual station, more fitting for the Russia "we have lost" (imperial or Soviet) than for the real, Putinist Russia we actually have. In short, by the tacit consensus of the elites, the offer should have been taken. But it lacked the one thing that mattered most to Putin: the humiliation of Ukraine and of Zelensky personally – which, in the design of Kremlin strategists, was meant to be the war's chief trophy, a scalp on the gates of "Tsargrad" that would convince every Russian ultra that this had been a victory.
It is, in fact, a thoroughly gangster way of thinking – to see victory chiefly as the humiliation of the enemy. Which is why, in response, Putin put forward a virtually unfulfillable condition: the voluntary surrender of Donbas territories. It was a symbolic gesture, one that would have amounted to the civic execution of Ukraine and of Zelensky personally. Naturally, Ukraine could not agree to this, and the matter was left hanging in midair. From today's vantage point it's become obvious that Putin was trying to outwit Trump by slipping into the negotiating package a condition that would blow Ukraine apart from within – and thereby hand him victory, one way or another. In the end, he only fooled himself.
It's hard to say what guided him – the songs of the General Staff's sirens, whispers from GRU serpents, or simply an intuition long attuned to the Apocalypse (he is already, mentally, in Paradise) – but everything, as usual, went off script. Zelensky did not surrender; instead, he unleashed on Europe not only anti-Putin but also anti-Trump "agitation and propaganda," which mobilized Europe and secured for Ukraine a resource for striking deep into Russia that it had never had before. That was the moment the spirit of Anchorage gave up the ghost. And although Putin personally, true to form, believes he was once again "played for a fool" and keeps trying to resuscitate that dead spirit, the Kremlin as a whole understands that a renegotiation is coming – and is quietly looking for a replacement for Dmitriev.
