How the Anchorage Peace Framework for Russia and Ukraine Threatened Too Many People to Survive

By the time they met in Anchorage, the war had already eaten through several maps and a generation of illusions. The Ukrainian front was shrinking. Western armour was rusting in the fields. Moscow had stopped pretending that Donbass and Crimea were temporary holdings. Washington had stopped pretending that Kyiv could reverse any of it by force.

What there still was, briefly, was a plan.

Not a ghost of a plan, not a think tank pamphlet, not some fantasy of victory pushed across cable news by retired generals who had not seen a trench since their academy days. A real plan. Written, numbered, transmitted. Twenty eight points that, if the political system had allowed it, could have frozen the battlefield where it actually stood, capped the war before it swallowed more men, and replaced slogan with settlement.

That plan did not fail.

It was not allowed to succeed.

The first draft of peace

It began, as these things often do, in a different city and a different year.

In Istanbul in the spring of 2022, while Western leaders were still promising that sanctions would bring Russia to its knees and that Ukraine’s counter offensives were just over the horizon, negotiators from Moscow and Kyiv sat in the same rooms and put pen to paper.

The draft they initialled was rough and incomplete, but it contained one idea that mattered more than the rest. Ukraine would remain a state. It would have an army. That army would be capped.

The numbers were brutally simple.

Moscow wanted a ceiling around one hundred and eighty five thousand. Kyiv argued for two hundred and fifty thousand, roughly the size of its regular forces before the full invasion. Around that band, the argument moved. Above that band lay the fantasy armies that existed only in Western opinion pieces and deck slides. Below it lay a demilitarised protectorate.

There were other clauses. Security guarantees. Neutrality language. Territorial ambiguities designed to square the circle between what was held on the ground and what was recognised on paper. Istanbul was not a peace, but it was the first acknowledgement, in black and white, that the war could not be solved by shaking more weapons out of NATO warehouses.

The draft was initialled. Then it was buried.

Kyiv moved back to maximalist rhetoric. Western capitals reverted to talk of defeating Russia. Those who raised Istanbul as a possible template were treated as if they had leaked nuclear codes. The war rolled on.

Anchorage: the summit that admitted reality

Three years and many hundreds of thousands of casualties later, the core of Istanbul resurfaced in a place where the cameras did not linger.

Anchorage, August 2025.

Trump and Putin, both older and more cynical than their caricatures, met with small teams on each side. The language of the summit communiqués was bland. The underlying exchange was not.

The United States, through its elected president, accepted that there would be no magical rewind of February 2022. Donbass would not be stormed back into Ukraine. Crimea would not be stormed out of Russia. The front would not be rolled back to some fantasy line ordained by opinion writers in New York and Brussels.

Russia, through its president, accepted that the war would end not with the erasure of Ukraine, but with its reduction and neutralisation. Kyiv would still have a flag, a government, an army. It would not have NATO membership, NATO bases, or an unlimited force that could be rebuilt into a threat at some later date.

Out of that understanding came a framework.

Donbass and Crimea would be accepted, de facto, as Russian. Ukrainian forces would withdraw from Donbass. Other occupied territories would be subject to transitional arrangements, including ceasefire lines and staged political processes. Ukraine would receive security guarantees and economic support, but not an open door into NATO.

There would be no NATO troops on Ukrainian soil. At most, some carefully bounded Western presence under another label, if Moscow agreed. The size of the Ukrainian armed forces would be fixed, not at the million men Kyiv had burned through in the middle years of the war, but at a level that Russia could accept and Ukraine could afford.

Istanbul had been an attempt to stop a war at the beginning. Anchorage was an attempt to stop it before the shelling reached the bottom of the manpower barrel.

Turning a handshake into paper

You cannot govern by nod and wink, even when you are a president. What Anchorage needed next was paper.

That job fell, not to the usual diplomatic caste, but to the people Trump actually trusted. Steve Witkoff, the New York real estate ally who had his ear. Jared Kushner, who had already trafficked in impossible Middle Eastern deals and come out with more signatures than anyone expected. On the Russian side, Kirill Dmitriev, the financier and go between who could move drafts outside official channels and still get them read in the Kremlin.

Together they turned Anchorage into a document.

Twenty eight points. Not rhetoric, not aspirations, but clauses.

The plan did what serious plans do. It carried the logic of the summit forward without spelling everything out in language that would cause Kyiv or Brussels to detonate on first reading.

Ukraine would withdraw from Donbass. Crimea would not return. Other territories would be subject to phased arrangements, but the direction of travel was clear. The Ukrainian army would be capped at a level below the mobilisation frenzy of 2022 to 2024. There would be a ban on NATO forces on Ukrainian soil. There would be some creative handling of Russia’s frozen assets, which Moscow would hate but might trade for other concessions.

Crucially, the twenty eight points reflected Anchorage. They did not try to smuggle in the old illusions.

Russia did not receive this plan through a formal American démarche. The State Department did not carry it in through the front door. It arrived, as so many serious things arrive, through the side entrance. Dmitriev’s channels. Ushakov’s desk. Lavrov’s briefing.

Both men did something rare in the present climate. They did not dismiss the document. They did not pretend they had never seen it. They said publicly that there was a plan, that it reflected the understandings reached in Anchorage, that Russia welcomed it in principle, and that many points would need clarification.

They also said something else. If, by the time the plan arrived in official form, it no longer reflected Anchorage, then it would not be the same plan. It would be treated as an entirely different proposal.

Anchorage was not a brand name. It was a line in the sand.

Geneva: where the line began to move

The line began to move in Geneva.

That is where Ukrainian representatives sat down with Trump’s envoys, with Europeans hovering around the edges of the room and on the edges of the phone calls. It is there that the twenty eight points were pared down, rewritten and bent back toward the goals that Kyiv and Brussels had never abandoned.

The basic message from the Ukrainian side was simple.

We will not touch the constitution. The clause that commits Ukraine to NATO membership stays. We will not sign anything that recognises any Russian territory as legitimate. Not Donbass, not Crimea, not the rest. We will not accept a hard cap on the army that reflects what the battlefield has done to us. In fact, some of our European friends are now talking about an army of eight hundred thousand.

This was not bargaining. It was denial distilled into bullet points.

The result was a nineteen point Geneva version of the plan. The clauses that annoyed Kyiv and Brussels most disappeared or were softened. The parts that preserved the old slogans were retained. The spirit of Anchorage, in which both presidents had acknowledged that the war had been lost on the Ukrainian side, was drowned in the familiar talk of sovereign choices and territorial integrity.

Moscow did not see this shorter plan. Lavrov and Ushakov have been unambiguous. They know that something exists. They have read about it in the papers like everyone else. They have not received it from the government that supposedly drafted it.

They still hold, in front of them, the twenty eight points that reflect Anchorage. They are waiting, formally, for Washington to decide whether that is still the policy.

The quiet sofa in Abu Dhabi

While the paper thickened in Zurich hotels and Geneva salons, the war continued. And on another chessboard, another channel quietly moved.

In Abu Dhabi, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov had been meeting his Russian counterparts. Officially to talk about prisoners. In practice to talk about everything states talk about when they pretend to talk only about prisoners. Casualty numbers. Morale. Supply constraints. Political storms back home.

On the Russian side the man in the room was almost certain to be Admiral Igor Kostyukov, head of military intelligence. A serious figure, but not a political decision maker. He does not sit on the Security Council. He reports up the chain of command to Gerasimov and then to Putin. His job is to know what is happening and to manage crises, not to redraw borders.

That Abu Dhabi channel existed for one simple reason. It is easier to swap bodies and prisoners when you are not shouting at each other from podiums.

Then, one day, a third man walked in.

Dan Driscoll, Trump’s new peace envoy, had done something that his predecessor Keith Kellogg never managed. He had told the Europeans and the Ukrainians, to their faces, that the war was being lost and could not be rescued by another arms package. And he had gone looking for the Russians.

When he found Budanov and Kostyukov sitting down in Abu Dhabi, he took the chance. He joined the table.

From a diplomatic point of view this was exactly what a serious peace envoy is supposed to do. There was a plan on the table in Moscow. There was an Anchorage understanding that needed to be fixed in writing. There was a Ukrainian intelligence chief with enough realism to talk to the other side away from cameras. There was a Russian intelligence chief doing the same. Driscoll sat down and listened.

The Russians were polite and clear. They were not there to negotiate the plan. They lacked the mandate. If Washington wanted to talk about twenty eight points rather than prisoner lists, it would have to send Witkoff, Kushner and Driscoll to Moscow to sit with Ushakov and Lavrov, and, eventually, with Putin himself.

That is what was being arranged.

A written plan rooted in Anchorage. A Ukrainian military elite that knew the war was going badly. A Russian leadership that had given public signals of conditional acceptance. An American president who had decided that the war needed to end on the battlefield that actually existed, not the one NATO had drawn in its heads.

That was the point at which the system moved.

The leak campaign begins

The first shots were familiar.

A Ukrainian politician, Oleksiy Goncharenko, published an image of the twenty eight point plan. The text, or a close variant of it, flooded into Western media. Commentators who had never read the Istanbul drafts, never looked at the casualty tables, never asked how many brigades Ukraine had left that were not skeletal, declared that the plan was surrender.

Leaders who had watched the whole war from conference halls, like Emmanuel Macron, announced that any settlement that reflected Anchorage would be unacceptable. France still wanted the option of sending troops. Europe still wanted to pretend it could decide Ukraine’s future without paying any of the real price for it.

Then the leaks grew sharper.

Someone in Washington, or in a friendly allied capital, revealed the existence of the Abu Dhabi talks. The fact that Budanov had been in a room with Russian officers became public. The fact that a Ukrainian armed forces chief had been talking to the enemy away from cameras became available to every rival in Kyiv.

This was not transparency. It was a warning shot.

But the most sensitive leak did not concern a plan or a meeting. It concerned a phone call.

According to reports based on leaked transcripts, Bloomberg published a story about a conversation between Steve Witkoff and Yuri Ushakov. It said, essentially, that Witkoff had been advising Putin’s aide on how to pitch the peace plan to Trump. The subtext was obvious. Witkoff was portrayed as a kind of double agent, giving tips to the Russians on how to work his own president.

The reality is less dramatic and more serious.

When a president appoints a peace envoy, that envoy’s primary job is to explain to the other side how to make a deal survivable at home. What kind of call might be useful. What topics to open with. How to structure a conversation so it does not implode at the first sentence. That is not betrayal. It is diplomacy.

An intelligence agency had recorded that call. That is unsurprising. They record almost everything. What matters is what happened next. Instead of treating the intercept as classified, a tool to help the elected administration manage risk, someone leaked it.

The transcript was passed to Bloomberg and used in a way that cut directly across the president’s policy.

When the news organisation went to the White House for comment, the response was not contrition. The communications director said the story proved only one thing, that Witkoff spoke to Russian and Ukrainian officials nearly every day to achieve peace, which was exactly what the president had sent him to do.

That should have been the end of it.

To many observers inside Washington, the effect of the leak was to send a different signal. It suggested that any official who tried to implement Anchorage would be turned into the next Mike Flynn. Their calls would be tapped, their words selectively published, their loyalty questioned. The intelligence powers that are supposed to protect the republic would, in practice, be used to veto the foreign policy of its elected head.

Legally, this category of leak is one of the very few where even journalists can be dragged into the same dock as the source. Publishing the contents of intelligence intercepts alerts foreign officials that their phones are compromised and destroys years of access. Inside the agencies, this kind of leak is ordinarily treated as a cardinal sin, except, it seems, when the target is a domestic political rival.

Nobody seriously believes that anyone will be prosecuted for leaking the Witkoff intercepts. That is the point. There is one law for whistleblowers like Manning or Snowden, and another for those who leak from the top of the security pyramid. In practice, the effect of such leaks is to kill a peace before it can be tested.

The three blocks that preferred no peace

This is what it means to say that the plan was not allowed to succeed.

The line from Istanbul to Anchorage to the twenty eight points is straightforward. At each stage, the people closest to the facts on the ground moved, reluctantly, to the only settlement that reality would bear.

Ukraine would be smaller than it was in 2013. Russia would be larger than it was in 2013. The West would not get to pretend those changes had not happened. Ukraine would remain armed, but not armed to the teeth. Russia would live next to a state that could not be switched on and off as a proxy army. Europe would not get the thrill of a permanent forward operating base in Kharkiv, and would also not have to live with the risk of losing Warsaw.

None of this is romantic. None of it is morally satisfying. It is not meant to be. It is what remains when the firing stops.

Against that logic stand three blocks of resistance.

A Ukrainian political leadership that cannot admit, for domestic reasons, that the war is lost, and that treats every concession of territory or status as political suicide.

A European class that has discovered that it can fight a war with Russian artillery using Ukrainian bodies and American money, and that would rather pay that price than confess that its entire security doctrine since the nineteen nineties was wrong.

A United States permanent government that has built its identity around the belief that Moscow must be contained, pressured and humiliated, and that regards any president who tries to build a working relationship with Russia as a threat to its own authority.

Those three blocks do not need to coordinate. They only need to react the same way when a real plan appears.

Leak it. Misrepresent it. Expose the channels that make it possible. Discredit the people tasked with implementing it. Turn peace into an act that looks more dangerous, more suspect, more career ending, than war.

The table is still there. The twenty eight points still exist. The Russians have not forgotten Anchorage. The war continues.

The plan did not fail.

It is being prevented.

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