Lavrov Did Not Rule Out The Possibility That Putin Had Been “duped”

• 23.06.2026, 15:10

The Russian Foreign Minister spoke about the allegations.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke about “suspicions” that the meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Anchorage—where, according to the Kremlin, certain agreements on Ukraine had been reached, was a ruse intended to buy time for additional arms deliveries to Kyiv

“I don’t even want to suspect that Alaska, like the European actions, was intended to buy time to further arm the Kyiv regime; I don’t even want to think about it. But in reality, it turned out the way it did,” Interfax quotes Lavrov as saying.

According to the foreign minister, Moscow no longer considers the U.S. an “objective mediator” and sees an intensification of sanctions pressure on Russia

The meeting between Putin and Trump in August 2025 marked the Russian president’s first visit to the U.S. in the past 10 years and the first high-level talks between Moscow and Washington since 2021. And although the meeting was followed by numerous rounds of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations, Putin refused to make concessions and maintained his maximalist demands on Kyiv for the complete surrender of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Claiming that Kyiv had “no trump cards,” Trump has revised his assessment of the war in Ukraine, Western diplomats told Bloomberg in June. According to them, a consensus has emerged among the U.S. president’s inner circle and among G7 leaders that Russia will not be able to achieve victory on the battlefield. Now, as one G7 representative said on condition of anonymity, the U.S. and its European allies agree that Kyiv’s position is strengthening.