Why Trump And Putin Chose "inconvenient" Alaska For Their Meeting

A multi-hour flight for everyone.

Although Alaska is the closest part of the United States to Russia and the distance between the mainland parts of the two countries is about 88 kilometers, both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will have to fly for hours to attend the summit on August 15. So why did the meetings choose Alaska?

An attempt to answer that question was made by The Guardian journalist Dan Sabbagh, based in Kiev.

In his article, he recalls that Putin's foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, called Alaska a "perfectly logical" place to hold the summit, "as if swinging across the Bering Strait separating the countries is to make an ordinary trip." And while the distance between the US mainland and Russia here is indeed about 88 kilometers, it's about a nine-hour flight from Moscow to Anchorage, Alaska's largest city. Even for Trump, who will fly from Washington on Air Force One, the trip will not take much less than eight hours. Therefore, Alaska is a logistically inconvenient place for both sides, which indicates that other factors influenced the choice of location, states The Guardian.

The publication's journalist names several such factors. First, this remote state is located far away from Ukraine and its European allies, which threatens to sideline them. While Trump - at least in theory - seems open to the possible participation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the meeting, "it's hard to imagine Putin being as welcoming." After all, the ultimate reward for the Russian dictator ended up being precisely the chance for a private meeting with the White House host - regarding sanctions, trade, NATO's influence in Europe, etc. All these topics of negotiation go far beyond his aspirations to dominate Ukraine, the author of the publication reminds us.

In addition, Alaska is a safe place for the Russian dictator to visit. Putin is still wanted by the International Criminal Court, which issued a warrant for his arrest more than two years ago on war crimes charges related to the forced deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia. However, neither Russia nor the United States recognizes the jurisdiction of that court. Nor are there any unfriendly countries that Putin would have to cross given this threat. After all, flying across the "top" of the globe is much easier for him than flying through other countries where difficulties could have arisen - including traveling to Istanbul across the Black Sea.

Historical experience also suggests that US-Russia or US-USSR summits have more often than not actually been held "in cooler places, reflecting to some extent the more northerly location of the two countries," The Guardian reminds us. The most notable meeting was in Helsinki in 2018. Then, when Trump and Putin last met in the Finnish capital, the US leader said he trusted Putin more than his own intelligence agencies when it came to allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

And those who remember the Cold War may recall the 1986 Reykjavik summit, where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev discussed the elimination of nuclear weapons, although they could not come to a full agreement, The Guardian writes. At the time, Gorbachev wanted Reagan to give up testing a space-based anti-missile system (was known as "Star Wars"). However, the then US president did not agree to this and the summit collapsed. In the 1990s, when summits between the two countries were more frequent, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin met in Birmingham and Shropshire (both in England, UK) in 1998, when Russia had just joined the G8.

Nuclear disarmament and cooperation within are now quaint echoes of other eras, writes Dan Sabbagh. The Aug. 15 meeting in Alaska will be only the fourth summit between the U.S. and Russia since 2010. While it remains possible that the talks will lead to a cease-fire in Ukraine, there is little reason for optimism, he says. After all, Russia continues to wage a fierce war on the front and home front and bomb Ukrainian cities "in an attempt to force its democratic neighbor into submission," The Guardian journalist concludes.

"It is unlikely that Vladimir Putin will arrive in Alaska on Friday [August 15] to make a territorial claim to Donald Trump over the 49th state sold by Tsar Alexander II to the United States for $7.2 million in 1867," the article says. However, Putin clearly has another "deal" in mind: an attempt to convince Trump of the benefits of a "swap" of Ukrainian territories for the sake of possibly getting him to agree to a ceasefire. This is something the US president "desperately wants but doesn't know how to achieve," The Guardian reminds us.

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