A look at Alaska’s Russian past as Trump and Putin prepare to meet
The US bought the territory from Russia for US$7.2 million in 1867, a deal once mocked as ‘Seward’s folly’
Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will hold a high-stakes meeting about the Ukraine war on Friday in Alaska, which the United States bought from Russia more than 150 years ago.
Russian influence still endures in parts of the remote state on the northwest edge of the North American continent, which extends just several kilometres from Russia.
When Danish explorer Vitus Bering first sailed through the narrow strait that separates Asia and the Americas in 1728, it was on an expedition for Tsarist Russia.
The discovery of what is now known as the Bering Strait revealed the existence of Alaska to the West - however Indigenous people had been living there for thousands of years.
Bering’s expedition kicked off a century of Russian seal hunting, with the first colony set up on the southern Kodiak island.