In the lead-up to Friday’s Trump-Putin summit, Russians already are crowing victory. The choice of Alaska checks many boxes. Anchorage is midway between Moscow and Washington. Ukraine and Europe are 5,000 miles away. There will be no other heads of state to clutter photo ops. The pesky issue of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin does not apply — America is not a signatory to the enabling treaty.
The location, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, provides world-class landing strips and a security shield against people protesting Mr. Putin’s first visit to America in a decade. Most importantly for Russians, Alaska was, until 1867, Russian. Talking to reporters in Washington last week, President Trump twice misspoke, saying: “I’m going to Russia on Friday.”
To this day, the map of coastal Alaska is dotted with such placenames as Nikolai, Tolstoi Point, and Glory of Russia Cape. Along the coast, there are 89 Russian Orthodox churches serving an estimated 30,000 parishioners, largely Aleuts and Tinglits.
This weekend, it would not be surprising if Mr. Putin slips away from the military base to be photographed lighting a candle for peace inside Anchorage’s St. Innocent Russian Orthodox Cathedral. With its nine onion domes painted robin’s egg blue, the Cathedral honors a 19th century missionary, Saint Innocent of Alaska. He rose to become Metropolitan of Moscow.
Back at Moscow, notable Russians are ululating with joy. “Born as Russian America — Orthodox roots, forts, fur trade — Alaska echoes those ties and makes the U.S. an Arctic nation,” a Russian negotiator with the United States, Kirill Dmitriyev, posted on X. Illustrating his feed with color photos of Orthodox churches in Alaska, he urged: “Let us — Russia and the U.S. — partner on environment, infrastructure, and energy in the Arctic and beyond.”
Political commentator Boris Pervushin told TASS news agency: “Alaska was once Russian land, and now it is becoming a venue for direct dialogue between the two leaders without intermediaries, underscoring the special, partnership status of the talks.”
Russian historian Alexander Bobrov waxed poetic in an essay for state media outlet RT. He wrote that the choice of Alaska “carries a rare blend of symbolism. It reaches deep into the past, reflects the current geopolitical balance, and hints at the contours of future US–Russia relations.”
“Alaska’s story began as Russian, continued as American — and now has the chance to become a shared chapter, if both sides choose to see it as an opportunity rather than a threat,” continued Dr. Bobrov, author of the book, “The Grand Strategy of Russia.” He wrote that “Alaska is a fitting place for such discussions: its own history is a vivid reminder that territorial ownership is not an immutable historical-geographic constant, but a political and diplomatic variable shaped by the agreements of great powers in specific historical moments.”
This last point — that American Alaska is the fruit of a win-win real estate deal — makes Ukrainians uneasy. Last week, Mr. Trump talked of reaching peace through “land swaps.” Today, in a Zoom call with Mr. Trump, European leaders and President Volodymyr Zelensky are to press their view on the needed sequence: Ceasefire, security guarantees, and then negotiations for a lasting, Korea-style armistice.
For Mr. Trump, a real estate dealmaker by trade, Washington’s purchase of Alaska rivals the Louisiana purchase as the best American land deal of the 19th century. After losing the Crimean War in 1856, Tsar Alexander II started putting out feelers to Washington about buying his distant North American colony. Alaska was a money loser and at its peak populated only by 700 Russians. During the Crimean War, Britain’s Royal Navy shelled Petropavlosk, a naval base across the Bering Strait from Alaska.
By selling Alaska to the United States, Russia could prevent Britain from expanding further from Canada. The United States was distracted by the Civil War. By 1867, though, Washington could refocus on territorial expansion.
“It was simply a matter of selling them, or watching them being taken,” the Russian envoy to Washington, Eduard de Stoeckl, wrote to a friend about the sale of Russia’s Alaska holdings, in March 1867. The sale went through for $7.2 million. The Tsar paid Baron de Stoeckl a $25,000 brokerage fee.
American press reception was skeptical. The New York Sun lampooned faraway Alaska as “Walrussia.” The Sun and other newspapers scored the secretary of state, William Seward, calling the purchase of 586,412 square miles at two cents an acre as “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Icebox.” The New York Daily Tribune complained: “We may make a treaty with Russia, but we cannot make a treaty with the North Wind or the Snow King.”
Although the cancelled check is on display at the National Archive in Washington, some Russian ultranationalists claim today — 158 years after the fact — that the payment never went through. In the hyper nationalist mood of modern Russia, billboards have gone up proclaiming: “Alaska is ours.” Last year, Russian TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov demanded that Finland, Poland, the Baltics, Moldova, and Alaska should be “returned to the Russian Empire.”
A former American ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, connected the two threads in a tweet last Friday on X: “Trump has chosen to host Putin in a part of the former Russian Empire. Wonder if he knows that Russian nationalists claim that losing Alaska, like Ukraine, was a raw deal for Moscow that needs to be corrected.”
Mr. McFaul now posts that sources at Washington tell him that Mr. Trump did not misspeak about his travel plans. After the Anchorage summit, the two presidents may fly across the Bering Strait for a quick visit to Russia.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
