Secretary of State Marco Rubio told journalists in Manama, Bahrain on June 22, in the course of his tour of Gulf Cooperation Council countries this week, that when presidents Trump and Putin met in Anchorage, Alaska on Aug. 15, 2025, “there was no agreement in Alaska. There was a proposal in Alaska, but there was no agreement in Alaska. If there had been an agreement, we would have had an end to the war,” Rubio lied.
Rubio’s comments come as there is a major policy discussion underway in Russia over how to respond to unending Western provocations and threats to Russia’s very existence, and if there ever was, or still is, an “Anchorage Understanding” that they can get Trump to return to.
Rubio has been building up to this flat-out reversal of Trump’s earlier policy. On June 19, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took note: “Recently, speaking at congressional hearings, my counterpart, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, said to our surprise that Washington was unable to act as a mediator on Ukraine matters, because the United States fully supported Ukraine.”
Today, Lavrov responded more pointedly to Rubio’s latest Bahrain remark: “President Vladimir Putin, addressing Steve Witkoff, who was likewise in attendance, began to enumerate the US proposals point by point. Following each item, in the presence of US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he inquired of Steve Witkoff whether he had accurately captured the ideas brought to Moscow ahead of Anchorage. To each of these queries, Steve Witkoff responded in the affirmative. Therefore, when my colleague Marco Rubio contends that only proposals were made in Alaska and no agreement was reached, I am left to question what precisely is meant by ‘agreement.’ If one party, in this case the United States, puts forward its proposals for a settlement—for an approach to resolving this crisis—and the other party expresses concurrence with these proposals, then to state that no agreement was reached appears, to put it mildly, somewhat inelegant.”
