Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Donald Trump of the United States will meet in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15.
Putin will be the first-ever Russian leader to visit Alaska, which was sold to the United States in 1867 for $7.2 million.
According to the US media, the summit will be held at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a combined US Air Force and Army installation in Anchorage, Alaska.
The meeting between Putin and Trump will begin at approximately 10:30 p.m. Moscow time on August 15 with a one-on-one conversation between the two leaders. “This conversation will be held in a tete-a-tete format, naturally, with the participation of interpreters.”
Talks between delegations will see five people on each side: “Certainly, a group of experts will be somewhere nearby.”
Following the meeting, Putin and Trump will give a joint press conference for the media “where they will sum up the results of the talks.”
Following the one-on-one conversation, Putin and Trump will continue the talks “over a working breakfast.”
The leaders will make brief statements in the open part of the talks. “It is planned that at the very beginning of the meeting, each president will say a couple of words, as is customary at international talks.”
The lineup of the Russian delegation has been determined. It includes Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov, Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov and Special Presidential Representative for Investment and Economic Cooperation with Foreign Countries Kirill Dmitriev.
Alaska was discovered by Russian explorers Mikhail Gvozdev and Ivan Fyodorov in 1732. The first settlement of Russian America, Three Saints Bay, was founded in 1784 by an expedition of merchant Grigory Shelikhov from Irkutsk. In 1799-1867, Alaska was governed by the Russian-American Company. The administrative center of Russian holdings in North America totaling around 1.5 million square kilometers in area was located in Novoarkhangelsk (now Sitka). Russian America’s borders were fixed by the treaties with the United States (1824) and the British Empire (1825).
During World War II, land-lease aircraft were flown from the United States to the Soviet Union along the Alsib (Alaska-Siberia) air route, or the Northern Trace. Soviet pilots were trained to pilot US-made aircraft in Alaska. As many as 205 people died while piloting aircraft along the Alsib route during WWII. Nine Soviet pilots were buried at the Fort Richardson National Cemetery at the above-mentioned base. The Land-Lease Monument, a memorial honoring Soviet and American pilots, was erected in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 2006.
