"Healthy anger is perfectly appropriate."
In 2026, Russian diplomacy acquired a new formula for self-description. It's worth exploring what lies behind it.
In the autumn of 1856, Alexander Gorchakov sent out a circular to the embassies, from which story I held back a sentence and a half: "Russia is not angry, Russia is concentrating." The formula was born out of defeat. The Crimean War was lost, the Black Sea fleet The southern borders were flooded, and the southern borders were disarmed under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. Gorchakov proposed not to take revenge or slam the door, but to remain silent, accumulate strength, and wait for the moment when the unfavorable balance could be reconsidered without firing a shot. Fifteen years later, the moment arrived: taking advantage of the Franco-Prussian War, St. Petersburg unilaterally revoked the humiliating clauses of the treaty. Restraint turned into strength in deferred form, although for a decade and a half it was mistaken for weakness.
Sergei Lavrov, who has led Russian foreign policy longer than some of his interlocutors have been alive, returns regularly to Gorchakov's formula and proposed an amendment to it in 2026.
"Getting angry and wasting your nerves is the worst thing. You need to focus," he said in an interview with TASS. "But healthy anger is perfectly appropriate."
The amendment is more interesting than it seems at first glance. It seems to change only the intonation. But in diplomacy, intonation is rarely "just" intonation: it functions as the content itself.
What exactly was corrected?
Gorchakov's restraint was built on silence. Concentration implied that no one would guess your intentions until you demonstrated the result. "Healthy anger" is structured differently: it requires the intention to be stated immediately, loudly, and with emotional undertones. It is a public demonstration of the resolve to use force, rather than quietly building it up.
The difference is not cosmetic. A silent power retains some room for maneuver: the enemy doesn't know where the red line is and is forced to exercise caution. A power that declares its anger partially squanders this freedom: the line is drawn out loud, making it harder to retreat. The 2026 formula trades some of this room for internal mobilization, a signal addressed not so much to Washington as to its own diplomatic corps.
And here arises the first question, one that the official rhetoric fails to answer. Gorchakov's concentration was the strategy of a weak man who knows he is temporarily weak. "Healthy anger" is presented as a position of strength. But isn't the very need for a mobilizing formula a sign that the real situation is closer to Gorchakov's than we'd like to admit?
A Lesson Called Anchorage
The practical meaning of the amendment becomes clearer when we look at its basis. In Russian expert circles, the "check first" formula is presented as a conclusion drawn from a very specific experience, dubbed the "spirit of Anchorage."
Only the factual framework has been firmly established. On August 15, 2025, at Elmendorf-Richardson Air Force Base near Anchorage, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump spent about three hours discussing Ukraine and departed without an announced agreement or a ceasefire. Everything else is subject to interpretation, and interpretations diverged instantly. Moscow retroactively fleshed out the meeting: the Foreign Ministry's year-end report speaks of "understandings" reached that could form the basis for a settlement; Dmitry Peskov calls the Anchorage platform a framework Washington is obligated to consider; and Lavrov demands that American peace proposals reflect the "spirit and letter" of what has been achieved. Washington views the same events differently: these were proposals and discussions, not a legally binding treaty, and the "spirit of Anchorage" is a formula that has become entrenched primarily in the Russian information sphere.
Hence the moral of the Russian commentary: verbal agreements with the West are worthless, and any future agreement must have a built-in verification mechanism. The lesson of Anchorage, however, is not an abstract maxim about the unreliability of promises, but a concrete case: a summit without a published text, which one side turned into a "spirit," and the other into "just a proposal."
But even if we accept the Russian version in its entirety, it's hard not to notice a logical flaw. The lesson is framed as a complaint about someone else's bad faith. Meanwhile, relying on verbal "understandings" without documentation, without witnesses, without a control mechanism—that's the choice of the party now complaining of deception. A promise not translated into a commitment guarantees nothing, and this should have been known before the summit, not after. "Check first" here isn't hard-won wisdom, but rather the ABCs of the trade, presented as a revelation.
Compromise and its double
The most valuable aspect of the new rhetoric lies not in its emotional appeal, but in a distinction that truly works. Lavrov insists: diplomacy is unthinkable without compromise, but compromise should not be confused with unilateral concession. Compromise is born from a reciprocal movement, where each side gives and receives. Concession, on the other hand, is the renunciation of one's interests under pressure, without an equivalent, for the sake of an abstract improvement in the atmosphere.
This distinction is neither a Russian invention nor an ideologeme. It's pure realism, Hans Morgenthau, the father of political realism, reinterpreted for a briefing. A state that trades a concrete asset for a vague promise of goodwill is committing not an act of generosity but a strategic error for which successors will pay. "Healthy anger" here is merely a psychological shell around a sober rule: don't trade the tangible for the intangible.
The problem is that the rule is flawless as long as one side applies it. Look at it from Kyiv's perspective, and it falls apart. What Moscow considers a serious compromise—a willingness to discuss a ceasefire without legally defining the status of territories—is read in Western capitals as an attempt to consolidate what has been achieved on the ground and gain recognition of the new status quo under the guise of concessions. Both sides sincerely believe they are ready for compromise. And both draw the line where, for the other, capitulation begins.
At this point, colleagues usually chime in, explaining that this time it's the other side that's being dishonest, while we're the paragon of constructiveness. I'd like to believe it. But the impasse isn't rooted in someone's ill will, but in the fact that one side calls the same point a compromise, while the other calls it a surrender. And as long as this is the case, "check first" doesn't resolve the impasse, it merely provides a stronger lock: checking requires criteria, criteria require agreement on what's being checked, and there's no agreement.
This is where a separate principle, almost textbook, emerges from the Russian side: freezing the war without addressing its root causes does not end it, but merely marks a pause before a new round. This concerns the status of territories, the security configuration, and the nature of power in Kyiv. The logic is internally consistent, and the same pattern is seemingly mirrored by opponents, for whom the root cause is the Russian presence itself. But the symmetry here is deceptive. Russia's "root causes"—the status of territories, the nature of power in Kyiv—are declared irreversible: not a negotiating position, but a condition from which to retreat would negate the very pretext for war. The reason cited by opponents, however, the presence, is by its very nature reversible. The dispute is not between two identical stubbornnesses, but between what one side has declared irreversible and what can be restored, but there is no need to. This is why it remains unresolved: the difference here is not in the assessment of the facts, but in their very reversibility.
The majority that is counted but not asked
The flip side of disengagement from the West is the bet on those who are not drawn into it. The category under which they are grouped has, in just a few years, evolved from an analytical observation to an element of official doctrine: a collection of states that have not declared Russia an adversary and, taken together, outweigh the historical West demographically, and in many ways, economically.
As an observation, this is difficult to dispute, and a figure is appropriate here. The BRICS countries alone currently account for approximately 40 percent of the global economy in purchasing power parity terms, and even more in the expanded context; for the first time in the long industrial era, the historical West is forced to acknowledge that others' share is greater than its own. A caveat is necessary: BRICS is not the entire non-Western world, but only its most well-defined part, and to mistake one for the other would be to overstate the coherence of the whole picture. But even with this adjustment, the shift is real. A power trading with Asia, Africa, and Latin America is generally less vulnerable to sanctions pressure due to the diversification of its ties than one locked into Western markets. The turn to the East is not an ideological whim, but the arithmetic of survival under restrictions.
What's questionable is the silence built into this category itself. The majority in question is defined negatively: by what it hasn't done. It hasn't condemned, it hasn't joined the sanctions, it hasn't severed ties. A common will cannot be derived from abstention. India, buying Russian oil at a discount, and Brazil, distancing itself from someone else's war, end up in the same category not because they share a common project, but because each individually preserves its own profit and freedom of action. To consider this majority an ally is to accept the sum of private calculations for the coalition.
And partners understand this better than the rhetoric directed at them. The appeal of formats like BRICS for Delhi or Brasilia lies largely in the fact that they don't require anyone to choose a side; economic gain and status merely complete the picture. Demand a choice, and the "majority" will begin to melt away, revealing two dozen divergent interests beneath the common banner. It is valuable as long as it remains an environment, not a bloc, and its fragility is not a defect to be corrected, but a condition of existence.
What's left of Gorchakov
If we remove the emotional frame and return to the essence, the shift Lavrov articulates boils down to a sober and, in fact, not entirely new idea: don't trade specific interests for vague promises, diversify ties, and distrust unformed agreements. Gorchakov would have signed all this without even looking. The realist school knew this before him.
Novelty in packaging. Restraint is rebranded as anger, the ABCs of craft are presented as a hard-won lesson, and the abstinence of other governments is counted as an asset, as support. The packaging works inward: it mobilizes, lends a long and uncertain standoff the appearance of a coherent strategy, and equips the diplomatic corps with a language that makes the forced appear chosen. This is a task that a major power, under pressure, always resolves, and resolves it through rhetoric, because there are no other means at hand.
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