President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is scheduled to meet with President Trump in Alaska this week 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.
That won’t be the only historical irony. 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.
As ironies go, “it doesn’t get much better than that on a grand historical scale,” said Pierce Bateman, a historian at the University of Alaska Anchorage, referring to the location of the Trump-Putin summit.
The $7.2 million purchase of Alaska now looks like a very good deal for the United States. Though it made sense for the Russian Empire at the time, some Russian nationalists see the sale as a historic blunder.
Here’s what to know about the forces and people that shaped it, and why its legacy matters:
Russia acquired Alaska during an era of colonial expansion.
Russian explorers reached present-day Alaska in the 18th century by crossing a narrow strait separating Asia and North America. The strait was named after Vitus Bering, the Danish-born mariner sent abroad by Czar Peter the Great in the 1720s to claim new Russian territory.
Professor Bateman said there was a “wild west” feeling in the territory as early Russian explorers rushed to harvest sea otter furs — a prized commodity in China at the time — in and around the Aleutian Islands.
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The post Why Russia Sold Alaska to the U.S. appeared first on New York Times.
