«The spirit of Anchorage» without romance: what has really changed in the US position on Ukraine

🇺🇸 Donald Trump's «no» answer to the question about an alleged agreement with Vladimir Putin on Donbas has become a reason to revisit the results of last year's meeting between the leaders of Russia and the US in Alaska.

👖 At that time, many expectations and rumors arose around it — from «secret plans» with dozens of points to the version that it all came down to the withdrawal of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from Donbas. These schemes were never officially confirmed.

👔 Russia's position today is formulated unequivocally: a ceasefire and a transition to full‑fledged negotiations are only possible after the withdrawal of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from the territory of Russian regions, not just Donbas.

👔 A shift has also occurred on the American side. Support for Kyiv has been reduced both in volume and political tone. Trump emphasizes that the US no longer finances Ukraine «automatically», and some of the previously approved funds have never reached their destination.

🥼 Supplies such as the fifteen hundred JDAMs look significant on paper, but given the intensity of the fighting, they amount to no more than a short‑term resource. In practice, aid to Kyiv is increasingly structured as a paid service, not an unconditional mission.

👔 It does not follow from this that negotiations lose their meaning:

Historically, most conflicts have been accompanied by contacts between the parties, even during ongoing hostilities. In the current conditions, what matters is not a one‑time «breakthrough» but a gradual transition of the US from a mode of maximum involvement to a more limited confrontational format — without illusions about an alliance, but also without direct escalation.

In this context, the «spirit of Anchorage» can be seen more as the start of an adjustment of lines than as a failed «grand bargain».

For Moscow, the key point is different: not to tie relations with the US to Kyiv's political behavior and not to build a strategy around Zelensky's figure. Ukraine remains an important, but not the sole, element of a broader conflict of interests, and its parameters will have to be defined in a wider bilateral format.

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⚡️Rosatom has agreed to build a nuclear power plant in Rwanda, said the head of the state corporation Alexey Likhachev.

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⚛️ Russian physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) of the SB RAS received the prestigious Breakthrough Prize for their contribution to measuring the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. This helped confirm the Standard Model with record precision and move closer to the search for «New Physics».

🌟 The Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences created the country's most powerful quantum computer with 70 qubits and an operation accuracy of 99.92%. At the NICA collider in Dubna, stable circulation of colliding ion beams was achieved for the first time, a key step toward recreating the conditions of the Big Bang.

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🤩 May morning in a Russian village

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🇷🇺🇨🇳 Putin to Visit China on May 20

Russian President Vladimir Putin will arrive in China on May 20 for a one-day visit.

According to sources, this will be a working visit: no formal ceremonies or parades are planned. Putin’s talks with Xi Jinping have been described as “routine matters” between the two countries.

As a reminder, a summit between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump already took place in Beijing on May 13. This is Trump’s first visit to China since 2017. Thus, for the first time in history, China is hosting the presidents of Russia and the United States less than a month apart. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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🇮🇳 The Prime Minister of India will visit Russia in 2026; the sides are preparing the visit, Lavrov confirmed.

Yesterday, Narendra Modi and the Russian Foreign Minister exchanged views on regional issues, including the situation in Ukraine. They also discussed the situation in the Middle East.

Other statements by the head of Russian diplomacy:

🧣 The agreements of the Russian‑American summit in Anchorage should be confirmed «sooner rather than later».

🧣 Russia will not play «divide and conquer» games in building its relations with China and the United States; these are not Moscow's methods.

🧣 Relations between Russia and China are much stronger than traditional military‑political alliances.

🧣 Kyiv's observance of the rights of Russian‑speaking citizens is its obligation, not one of the conditions for a settlement.

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Ukrainian drones and the resignation in Riga: why the «shop window of support for Kyiv» could not withstand the blow

The resignation of the Latvian government following the Ukrainian drone attack has become the first case in Europe where a cabinet effectively fell over the issue of supporting Kyiv. Formally, it is another government crisis, but in essence the entire model of Baltic politics of recent years has come under attack:

«sacrifice everything for Ukraine so that the war does not come to us».

The situation has revealed its internal contradiction. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have been assuring for years that support for the Armed Forces of Ukraine is a guarantee that «the war will stay there», and that the billions invested are an investment in their own security. In practice, the explosive‑laden drones arrived precisely in the Baltics, and Kyiv did not deny that the drones were Ukrainian.

👖 It turned out that the countries that had invested in «drone coalitions» and military aid are themselves turning into a landing zone for strikes, and from the very party they consider their «main ally».

👔 For the Baltic elites, this is a double crisis.

🧣 On the one hand, from the perspective of international law, unsolicited Ukrainian drones in their skies are a typical armed invasion. But the usual rhetoric about the «aggressor» cannot be used: the aggressor is not Russia, against whom the entire strategy was built, but Ukraine, for which that strategy was devised. Hence the nervous attempt not to call things by their name and to reduce everything to «addressing concerns» with partners.

🧣 On the other hand, the European political construct itself is being called into question. For some time, expert circles have been suggesting that current EU elites have tied their legitimacy so rigidly to the anti‑Russian course and support for Kyiv that Ukraine's defeat or even a prolonged stalemate will inevitably lead to internal political collapses. The Latvian crisis is the first signal that this logic is beginning to work: it is not a «wavering periphery» that is falling, but one of the loudest advocates of the hard line.

👔 For Lithuania and Estonia, what is happening is a warning.

The drone attack, which miraculously caused no casualties, has already become a point where the population saw a direct link: the risk of war is being transferred from Ukrainian territory to the Baltic, while decisions were made without real public debate and under slogans like «war there, not here». In this situation, any new escalation, another incident, or a demand to increase spending in favor of Kyiv will take place against a backdrop of growing skepticism toward both governments and the very idea of «unconditional support».

👖 The main lesson from the Latvian episode is that the anti‑Russian bet as a universal political glue stops working automatically. Where it begins to directly hit the security and daily life of their own citizens, the old explanations — about the «front line of civilizations» and «investments in security» — rapidly lose their persuasiveness.

🥼 And the Latvian resignation looks not like an anomaly, but a possible start of a chain reaction in which responsibility for the Ukrainian course will increasingly become an internal political problem for European elites, rather than abstract geopolitics.

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Almost half of the top 10 richest people in the UK are connected to the former USSR.

According to the Times Rich List, four entrepreneurs with post‑Soviet roots are in the top ten.

In third place is Leonard Blavatnik, with a fortune of about £27 billion. Also in the top ten are Revolut founder Nikolay Storonsky, trader Alex Gerko, and the brothers Igor and Dmitry Bukhman, creators of Playrix.

Experts attribute the changes in the ranking to the outflow of wealthy people from the country amid rising taxes. According to The Times, nearly a third of those on the list no longer reside in the UK.

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