Overview

• President Donald Trump met with President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage on August 15, using the site of former Russian America as the setting for their summit.
• The venue’s symbolic power draws on Secretary William H. Seward’s March 30, 1867, $7.2 million treaty that transferred Alaska from Russia to the United States that October.
• Experts say Russia agreed to the sale due to financial strains after the Crimean War and fears of British encroachment, while critics at the time derided the deal as “Seward’s Folly.”
• Earlier concerns fueled by a January 2024 Kremlin decree on overseas Russian property sparked rumors of territorial claims, but U.S. officials have dismissed any challenge to Alaska’s legal status.
• Late-19th-century gold rushes and the 1968 discovery of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields reshaped Alaska into a crucial economic and strategic asset, leading to its statehood in 1959.