By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
On April 29 President Vladimir Trump telephoned President Donald Trump for a conversation lasting more than an hour and a half. The conversation was reported by Putin’s spokesman, Yury Ushakov, as “in a friendly manner and was frank and businesslike.” It concluded, he said, “on a warm note, wishing each other all the best.”
If Putin detected any sign of cognitive disconnection in Trump – trailing sentences, lost subjects, slurring of speech, word salad, short-term memory loss, frequent change of topic – he is keeping the evidence top secret.
Instead, it is the official Kremlin position that Trump remembers the points of agreement he and Putin reached at their Anchorage, Alaska, meeting on August 15, 2025; and more, that Trump and Putin continue to stick to what is called in Moscow the Anchorage formula.
On January 23, 2026, following four hours of talks with Trump’s representatives, Steven Witkoff, Jared Kushner and Joshua Gruenbaum, Ushakov reported: “the participants in the conversation between the President of Russia and the Americans reaffirmed the fact that bringing about a lasting settlement would be unlikely without addressing the territorial issue based on the formula as agreed in Anchorage.”
On February 9, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed scepticism. “They have imposed sanctions against Lukoil and Rosneft. And they did it in the autumn, a couple of weeks after a good meeting between President Putin and President Trump in Anchorage. They tell us that the Ukraine problem should be resolved. In Anchorage, we accepted the US proposal. If we regard it “as men,” it means that they proposed it and we agreed, so the problem must be resolved. President Putin has said on many occasions that it is not important for Russia what Ukraine and Europe are going to say; we can clearly see the primitive Russophobia of most regimes in the European Union, with rare exceptions. The US position was important to us. By accepting their proposal, we seem to have completed the task of resolving the Ukrainian issue and moving on to a full-scale, broad-based and mutually beneficial cooperation.”
“So far, the reality is quite the opposite: new sanctions are imposed, a ‘war’ against tankers in the open sea is being waged in violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. They are trying to ban India and our other partners from buying cheap, affordable Russian energy resources (Europe has long been banned) and are forcing them to buy US LNG at exorbitant prices. This means that the Americans have set themselves the task of achieving economic domination. Furthermore, while they ostensibly made a proposal regarding Ukraine and we were ready to accept it (now they are not), we do not see any bright future in the economic sphere either.”
In their April 29 telephone call, according to Ushakov, a key element of the Anchorage formula was reiterated. “When discussing Russian-US relations, both leaders pointed to the great potential for mutually beneficial cooperation in the economic and energy spheres. The presidents stated that their representatives are already engaged in substantive discussions on a number of large-scale economic projects.”
Putin appears to believe that repetition of what Trump told him eight months ago is a continuing basis for talking with Trump and negotiating terms.
It is the public view and private consensus of the Security Council, including Foreign Minister Lavrov, that Trump no longer follows the Anchorage formula.
Repeating what he says is also Trump’s appeal to be believed.
On May 2 the White House posted a tweet of Trump repeating the word “winning” more than 3,600 times over an hour and seventeen seconds (lead images). The tweet remains on the White House site and has drawn more than 10.6 million views so far. Does the signal mean that Trump is credible? Or does it mean that it is no longer possible to negotiate with Trump because he is no longer sane?
That’s sanity measured neurologically, not personality disorders like megalomania and narcissism which have been identified in Trump’s speech and conduct for many years.
For a time, American public perception of Trump’s personality disorders has been influenced by voter partisanship: Democrat voters were more likely to identify him as a psychopath than Republicans. However, in 2020 this measured comparison of party affiliation with diagnosis concluded that “on the basis of overall rankings (independent of respondent’s party affiliation), Trump’s personality was collectively perceived to be at or above the 99th normative percentile for traits associated with four personality disorders (sadistic, narcissistic, antisocial, and passive-aggressive).”
Trump’s personality is widely debated in public; it has been voted in two presidential elections.
The medical condition of his brain is a state secret. This is because it may trigger the presidential disability provisions of the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution. If contested by a president with the support of his vice president and cabinet, a two-thirds majority of the two houses of Congress has the power to override and vote to remove him. That has not happened before.
The evidence of Trump’s deteriorating neurological condition was first reported here on July 25, 2024 after a CT brain scan was revealed following his hospitalization after the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt. The diagnosis then was White Matter Disease (WMD); a more detailed neurological analysis followed from several sources.
The neurological disease cannot be reversed or mitigated by drug treatment, as can personality disorders. “Symptoms begin to set in. These are usually manifested as ‘filter’ deficiencies — sudden emotional outbursts, inability to decide, long diatribes, stories about things from decades ago, inability to recognize one’s own mistakes and deficiencies, some mild memory issues, increased impulsive and risk-taking behaviour, anger and wrath, inappropriate laughing and crying among many others. This disease process also greatly magnifies the underlying personality disorders.” Read more on WMD from the clinical literature.
For WMD diagnosis, MRI scanning is more precise than CT scans.
In October 2025, fifteen months after Trump’s CT scan in Butler, the White House Physician, Sean Barbabella, reported that “advanced imaging” was done on Trump at the Walter Reed Military Medical Centre. More than two weeks later, Trump admitted in a press exchange: “I got an MRI. It was perfect. Yeah. I mean, I gave you the full results. We had an MRI. And — the machine, you know, the whole thing and it was perfect” – read more.
Barbabella reported on October 10, 2025, that Trump exhibits “strong cardiovascular, pulmonary, neurological and physical performance.” That was seven months ago. As a US Navy captain, Barbabella serves under orders of Trump as his commander-in-chief.
The Kremlin serves under different orders. The evidence revealed by Trump’s “winning” tweet of May 2, 2026, is of a man who cannot be negotiated with, not on the Anchorage formula since last August nor on the Hormuz formula now. This is because the evidence is that Trump is going mad. Going mad. Going mad.
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