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Anchorage was the Receipt: Europe is Paying the Price… and Knows it

By Gerry Nolan | Ron Paul Institute | February 10, 2026

Sergey Lavrov didn’t hedge. He didn’t soften. He lit the match and let it burn.

“In Anchorage, we accepted the United States’ proposal.”

And now, he says, Washington is no longer prepared to implement what it itself put on the table — not on Ukraine, not on expanded cooperation, not even on the implied promise that a different phase of US–Russia relations was possible.

That line matters because it shatters the performance. The offer was real enough for headlines — but not real enough to survive contact with the sanctions machine.

And then he let the contradiction sit there in plain sight — because while Washington was talking about cooperation, its navy and enforcement arms were busy doing something else entirely: tracking, boarding, and seizing oil tankers across oceans.

This is no metaphor — it is literal. In the months following Anchorage, US forces pursued and boarded vessels — most recently the Aquila II, across thousands of miles of open water, part of a widening campaign of maritime interdictions tied to sanctions enforcement. Tankers were chased, boarded, seized, or forced to turn back. At least seven were taken outright. Others fled. This is what “expanded cooperation” looked like in practice.

Lavrov didn’t need to raise his voice. The steel already had.

There is zero confusion. It was by design. The apparatus that actually enforces US foreign policy — sanctions, enforcement, energy leverage, financial choke points, and now routine interdiction at sea — does not pivot once engaged.

Even under the illusion of an “America First” presidency, what started as policy under Biden, (sanctions enforcement) now hardens. It builds constituencies, legal inertia, and moral alibis that make reversal look like surrender. Washington can change its language. But the machine keeps moving.

And Europe does more than follow, it leads the public Russophobic hysteria show. Every time.

Europe’s Energy Boomerang

The sanctions regime was never a clean moral stand. It was a war-speed demolition and rebuild of Europe’s energy system, carried out with ideological fervor and no concern for predictable consequences.

Eurostat calls household electricity prices “stable,” which is a neat way of avoiding the obvious: they remain well above pre-2022 levels. The shock didn’t pass. It set. Brussels celebrates “diversification,” but its own numbers quietly confess the damage: Russian gas cut from roughly 45 percent of EU supply in 2021 to about 13 percent by 2025; oil from 27 percent to under 3 percent; coal erased entirely.

That’s anything but adjustment. It’s amputation.

Germany — the supposed industrial spine of Europe — now treats energy prices like a security threat. Manufacturing closed out 2025 in deeper contraction, output slipping again as demand thinned. Berlin’s response has been nakedly revealing: subsidize the very costs its own policy detonated. Industrial electricity price supports were set to begin in early January (2026). Even projected grid-fee reductions are sold not as success, but as relief — relief from some of the highest power costs on the continent, dependent on state life support.

Europe mistook moral theater for strategy — and now pays the energy bill for the applause. This is the sanctions boomerang: punishment abroad, triage at home. While Russia ascends as an economic powerhouse, all on the backs of Eurocrat arrogance.

Dependency was not Ended — It was Merely Reassigned

Lavrov’s broader charge goes beyond Ukraine. He’s describing a system: the grand delusion of global economic dominance enforced through tariffs, sanctions, prohibitions, and control of energy and financial arteries — now enforced not just with spreadsheets, but with illegal maritime interdictions.

Europe’s experience since 2022 makes that system impossible to ignore. What’s sold as diversification increasingly looks like a dependency transfer. Stable, long-term pipeline supply gave way to exposure to a volatile global LNG bidding war — structurally more expensive, strategically weaker, and permanently uncertain. Long-term contracts are now pursued not from strength, but compulsion. A Greek joint venture seeking a 20-year LNG deal for up to 15 bcm per year isn’t sovereignty. It’s necessity, courtesy of Washington’s protection racket, started under the Biden admin but continued by Trump 2.0. But Europe had a choice, it could have chosen survival and sovereignty.

Europe didn’t escape leverage, which was more manageable with cheap and reliable Russian energy. It changed landlords.

And once sanctions start being enforced kinetically — once ships are chased, boarded, seized — the fiction that this is just “economic pressure” collapses. It becomes what it always was: control of supply.

When the Bible of Atlanticism Blinks

Here’s the tell — the kind that only surfaces when denial has finally failed.

Foreign Policy, the house journal of trans-Atlantic orthodoxy — the catechism, the Bible, the place where acceptable thought is laundered into seriousness — recently ran a headline that would have been unprintable not long ago: “Europe Is Getting Ready to Pivot to Putin.”

That matters precisely because of where it appeared.

Foreign Policy does not freelance heresy from the imperial court. It records shifts after they’ve already occurred by the trans-Atlanticist high priests. When it acknowledges a turn in this case, it’s conceding. The article wasn’t sympathetic to Moscow and wasn’t meant to be. It was brutally pragmatic: Europe is discovering that being sidelined by Washington in negotiations that determine Europe’s own future has consequences.

France and Italy — not spoilers, not outliers — are signaling the need for direct engagement with Moscow. Channels once frozen are reopening, carefully, almost grudgingly. Advisers are traveling. Messages are moving. This isn’t ideology evolving. It’s cold arithmetic reasserting itself.

Publicly, the tone remains Russophobic — absolutist, moralized, often shrill. Privately, the conclusion has already landed. European leaders now understand something they can’t scrub away: Russia did not collapse, did not fold, and did not exit history. Quite the opposite in fact.

They don’t have to like that fact. It no longer asks permission.

Russia Hardens — And Reads the Board

Russia’s response to Western pressure was not panic. It was recalibration. Economic diversification. Alternative settlement rails. Deeper Eurasian integration. An energy sector that rerouted flows instead of begging for mercy — even as its ships were hunted across oceans under the banner of “rules.”

Moscow also understands the American calendar. It knows Washington wants a fast off-ramp before the midterms — a way to reduce exposure without saying the quiet part out loud. It also knows the sanctions machine can’t reverse quickly without political bloodshed inside the US system itself.

That asymmetry is decisive.

Russia sees that Trump, whatever his instincts, holds fewer cards than advertised. He cannot simply switch off enforcement — maritime or financial — without confronting the architecture Washington spent years entrenching. Moscow therefore has no incentive to hurry, no reason to concede early, and every reason to sit tight, keep establishing cold battlefield reality on the ground and let the US political calendar amp up the pressure.

This isn’t stubbornness. It’s leverage, earned the hard way.

What a European Pivot Really Means

A real European pivot toward Russia would not be reconciliation or repentance. It would be an acceptance of geopolitical and civilizational reality at a moment when denial has become suicidal. Europe cannot build a durable security order in permanent opposition to Russia without crippling itself economically, industrially, and politically. The post-2022 experiment proved the limit: Europe hollowed out its own productive base much faster than it superficially constrained Russia’s strategic depth.

Energy interdependence, even when restructured, remains central to Europe’s survival as an industrial civilization. That reality cannot be legislated away or drowned in slogans. Pipelines, grids, shipping lanes, and supply chains answer to geography and physics, not values statements. A pivot means admitting that stability comes from managed interdependence, not performative severance — and that Russia, whether welcomed or resented, remains structurally vital in Europe’s continental system.

Most of all, it forces Europe to confront the truth it spent years skirting: the Atlantic order it tied itself to is in late-stage imperial implosion. Policy volatility, sanctions excess, enforcement maximalism, and election-cycle geopolitics aren’t glitches. They’re symptoms. Europe can no longer assume that alignment with Washington guarantees coherence, protection, or prosperity. Adaptation is no longer optional. Europe must re-enter history as a civilizational actor with agency — not as a dependency clinging to an order that can no longer carry its weight.

The Realignment is No Longer Merely Theoretical

The verdict from Anchorage wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was a reveal.

Washington made an offer it could not politically afford to honor, then defaulted back to sanctions, interdictions, and enforcement — the only language its system still speaks fluently. Europe crippled by the cost. Russia absorbed the pressure. Somewhere in between, the old Atlantic script quietly stopped working.

What’s changed now isn’t Europe’s rhetoric, but its private recognition. Even the most Russophobic Eurocrats understand what cannot be unsaid: Russia is not returning to the Western order, and Europe cannot afford endless confrontation.

Europe is not pivoting toward Russia out of goodwill. Russia is not waiting for Europe out of nostalgia. And Washington is no longer the indispensable broker it pretends to be.

The realignment is already happening — not because anyone chose it, but because the old order ran out of force before it ran out of slogans.

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Gerry Nolan is a political analyst, writer, and strategist focused on geopolitics, security affairs, and the structural dynamics of global power. He is the founder and editor of The Islander, an independent media platform examining war, diplomacy, economic statecraft, and the accelerating shift toward a multipolar world.

February 10, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Economics, Russophobia | European Union, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, United States