Several hundred protesters in the city of Anchorage (Down) They concentrated to reject the arrival this Friday of Vladimir Putinthe first Russian president visiting the former colony and who will be seen with his American counterpart, Donald Trumpwho seeks to return from this historic face to face with a peace road for Ukraine. “Putin is a war criminal and we should not be welcoming our country and much less Alaska,” Rachel Coney told Efe, one of the around 500 protesters who concentrated in Anchorage, the largest city in the state of Alaska, where this Friday will be seen on an unpublished summit Trump and Putin.
With a sea of flags of Ukraine, sunflowers and posters with slogans such as “We do not want war criminals in Alask rejection of the visit of the Russian president In a festive atmosphere. It is expected that this Friday, the protests will be held again with the arrival of Putin.
Putin, arrived this morning in Magadán, 6,000 kilometers east of Moscow, where he will visit a monument dedicated to friendship between the USSR and the US, on the way to Alaska, where he will meet with Trump. “It is an important city. Putin has been there numerous occasions as a prime minister,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told the local press about Magadan’s head of state. Putin has planned there to visit the monument to the Heroes of Alsiba (Alaska-Siberia Route), dedicated to Soviet and American pilots for cooperation between the two countries during World War II, when the US supplied the USSR with aircraft through a loan agreement. The monument was erected in 2020 on the occasion of the 75th Anniversary of Victory Day.
While Putin prepares his Visit to Alaskamobilizations are prepared. “We have been protesting since Trump began to behave like a monarch, but this is the greatest concentration we have seen so far,” said Marie Allen Lambert, which coincides with others that Alaska inhabitants are very proud of their land and will not celebrate the arrival of Russian President, who has an arrest warrant of the international criminal court for war crimes. “Alaska is with Ukraine” they pray some posters in a community that speaks of the United States such as “those below 48”, the parallel that divides them from the rest of the country, which accepted them as a state only in 1959, in the middle of the Cold War. “Trump does not deserve any Nobel Peace Prize. He does not have the interest of Ukrainians in mind and, in fact, is responsible for many deaths of children, starting with the deaths of many Americans during the Covid pandemic,” says Coney.
Land sold to the US in 1867
This city of 300,000 inhabitants, who now lives its most tourist summer months under the long sun of the Arctic winter, receives this Russian-American Summit With curiosity, but in general oblivious to the future of journalists and official Russian planes that precede the summit. For the first time, a Russian president will set the foot in the colony of the Imperial Russia until 1867, when it was sold for 7.2 million dollars (about 100 million dollars today) to the United States.
The face to face between Putin and Trump will be held after the security perimeter of the Elmendorf-Richardson Air Base, one of the most important military positions to monitor and counteract Russia in the Arctic. Trump has reduced the expectations of this first encounter between the two leaders since 2019, after recognizing that obtaining peace in Ukraine “was somewhat more difficult than I thought,” after promising before arriving at the White House in January that would achieve it in 24 hours.
Seven months later, Putin continues to bombard Ukrainian cities, causing the forced displacement of thousands of Ukrainians and slowly advancing the margins of the Donbás region in the east of the country. Trump hopes to get at least one the fire that opens the door to a peace agreement in which the Ukrainian President, Volodimir Zelenski participates, although some in Anchorage do not believe it. “Trump has long been believing that he is angry with Putin, but it is a show, we know what he thinks like him,” says Lambert, who will return this Friday to show his repulsa on the street for the arrival of Putin.
