President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is scheduled to meet with President Trump in Alaska on Friday to discuss the war in Ukraine. If they talk about Ukrainian land concessions as part of peace negotiations, as Mr. Trump has suggested, they will be doing so on land that Russia sold to the United States in 1867. Russia was moved to sell Alaska partly because of a war in Crimea, a peninsula that the Russian Empire annexed in 1783 under Catherine the Great. Crimea became part of an independent Ukraine in 1991, and Russia seized it in 2014 in a preview of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The $7.2 million purchase of Alaska now looks like a very good deal for the United States.

Source: The Times August 16, 2025 09:37 UTC