At the Edge of Peace: The Trump–Putin Summit and Bering Strait History with Russia

At the cease-fire summit with Donald Trump in Anchorage, Vladimir Putin invoked the geography that binds Russia and America reluctantly together: a pair of islands divided by a strip of water, miles wide, and with centuries of tangled history between them.

“We’re separated by the Bering Strait, though there are just two islands between Russia and the United States,” Putin said. “ We are close neighbors—and that is a fact.”

For decades, Little Diomede and Big Diomede have embodied the paradox of U.S.–Russian relations: close enough to see one another on a clear day, yet politically, worlds apart.

Putin’s mention of the “two islands” during his six-hour visit to Alaska—his first U.S. trip since 2015—reopened a chapter of Far North history, recalling World War II cooperation and Cold War chill that thawed briefly only to freeze again.

“We were kinda involved in those war days,” said 89-year-old Orville Ahkinga, Sr. who grew up on Little Diomede and now lives in Nome.  As a boy, he remembers his parents blacking out any light that might escape from the family window.
“Just about every night,” he said. “No lights.” 

LITTLE DIOMEDE ELDER— Orvilla Ahkinga Sr. dreams of another reunion with relatives who lived on Big Diomede Island. Photo by Jenni Monet

At the time, Dutch Harbor, the main U.S. naval base in the Aleutian chain, had just been raided by Japanese forces.  Though not on the scale of Pearl Harbor six months earlier, the attack was disruptive and deadly—a shocking signal that war had reached Alaska’s shores.

For Orville, though, he was still just a boy.  “I didn’t know to be scared,” he said.

Friday’s summit at Anchorage’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson marked the first time a Russian president visited Alaska—a territory the U.S. bought from Moscow for $7.2 million in 1867. That purchase set the boundary now running between the Diomede Islands, just 2.4 miles apart separated by the International Date Line—a 21-hour difference in time.

Orville calls it an “imaginary line”,  remembering when his parents once crossed it freely to see relatives on the big island.  But in 1948, that all ended.  FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover ordered a stop to the crossings, suspecting Native families of aiding the Soviets. The border slammed shut and Soviet troops occupied Big Diomede, forcing out its Indigenous residents to mainland Siberia. This included Orville’s grandfather, cousins, and  half-sister —some never to be seen again. 

Today, many among the Diomede diaspora still long for real reunification.  “But it probably won’t happen,” Orville said with a shrug—a sentiment others seem to share.

“I don't think that things improve between the two countries until Putin is gone from the scene,” said David Ramseur, a former aide to two Alaska governors, and author of “Melting the Ice Curtain: The Extraordinary Story of Citizen Diplomacy on the Russia-Alaska Frontier.”

Ramseur noted that the spirit of cooperation once nurtured by Mikhail Gorbachev — and, to a lesser extent, Boris Yeltsin — has all but vanished under Putin, especially since the attack on Ukraine.

“I've always been of the view that regardless of how bad things get, you ought to continue talking. But after the invasion of Ukraine, I think there's an exception to that rule,” Ramseur said.  “We've got to make Russia as much a pariah state as we can until we can get rid of Putin.”

Today, Moscow faces sweeping U.S. sanctions, and Putin himself is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

After nearly three hours of closed-door talks in Anchorage, Trump and Putin left without announcing any agreements or clear breakthroughs.  While Putin claimed they had agreed to “pave the path toward peace,” Trump stressed that major differences remain.

‘There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” he said.

From Bridge to Battleground

For thousands of years, the Bering Strait wasn’t a barrier but a bridge.  In winter, sea ice allowed Iñupiat and Yupik peoples to travel freely between Siberia and Alaska.  Orville believes his grandfather came from Russia’s Far East. Intermarriage tied the two coasts together with language, culture, and sea-mammal hunting. In many ways, Big Diomede and Little Diomede functioned as one island.

By the time Orville arrived in 1936, life on Little Diomede remained much as it had.  But five years later, Germany invaded the Soviet Union.  Suddenly, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R became uneasy allies—and Territorial Alaska was thrust onto the front line of a global war.
Through the Lend‑Lease program, America sent desperately needed weapons and aircraft north through Alaska to support the Eastern Front. From Nome, Soviet pilots ferried these planes—fighters, bombers, transports, and trainers—across the Bering Strait into Siberia. In symbolic acknowledgment of this wartime bond, Putin laid flowers at the graves of three Soviet airmen killed and now buried at Fort Richardson National Cemetery in Anchorage, following his summit with Trump.  

Orville remembers this history, too.  As a boy, he watched the planes fly over Little Diomede.

“In formation, like cranes,” he said.  “Every day—when the weather was good.”

As military buildup intensified in Alaska, so too did regional tensions. Much of this early Cold War history is framed by the Distant Early Warning Line—a vast radar network built to detect Soviet incursions across the Alaskan Arctic.

Yet for Alaska Natives recruited into the Territorial Guard during World War II, they engaged with the Soviets in ways that fostered diplomacy more often than provoking conflict. From the late 1940s through the 1980s, dozens of villages along the Bering and Chukchi coasts became outposts where subsistence hunters doubled as vigilant watchmen.

Both Orville’s father and grandfather served in the ATG.  And he remembered their “fierce looking” fatigues while peering through the armory window as they trained.
That armory still stands on Little Diomede, today, one of many dotting across the Bering Strait region.  While much of America crouched in fallout drills, these scouts held their ground on the shore—defending democracy, but also standing for peace.

“War is terrible,” said Orville, who later enlisted in the Army and saw firsthand what conflict had done to countries like Germany, South Korea, and Japan.  “People become terrible,” he said, shaking his head.

And if he had been face-to-face with President Putin, he knows exactly what he would have asked him: “Why did you start that war?”

EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY — Orville Ahkinga Sr., 89, grew up on Little Diomede and now lives in Nome. As a boy, he remembers, his parents blacking out any light that might escape from the family windows at the start of World War II. Photo by Jenni Monet

Arctic Stakes and Optics

Back at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson,  only service members seemed to outnumber the hundreds of journalists flown in from across the U.S. and Russia.

The Nome Nugget was among the press corps ready to question Trump and Putin, though not about Ukraine.  Our interests were about Arctic stakes: Russia’s energy deals with China, and how Alaska fits into this growing marketplace.

Days earlier, a senior Russian lawmaker told Moscow media that Russian corporations were eyeing Alaska’s rare earth minerals, sparking rumors that Trump might dangle commercial exploration as a bargaining chip to end the war.

“Not gonna happen,” U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski  shot back in a live CNN interview.

She, Rep. Nick Begich, Sen. Dan Sullivan, and Gov. Mike Dunleavy pressed the president directly as soon as he stepped off Air Force One.

“It was made clear by the Alaska delegation that this should not be in the cards,” Murkowski said, adding Trump quickly quashed the idea, as well.

By Sunday, on Face the Nation, Sullivan cast the U.S.’s “Arctic edge” in starker terms: intensifying competition over military power and resources. He pointed to Trump’s reconciliation bill—funding icebreakers, Coast Guard expansion, and missile defense—and warned that Alaska is becoming a flash point as Russia and China probe Arctic waters rich in energy and minerals.

“We’re an Arctic nation because of Alaska,” he said. “Alaska is the cornerstone of missile defense, the hub of air combat power, and central to building out our Arctic capabilities.”

With Trump rolling out a red carpet and applauding Putin, the optics  begged our question:  were these friendly exchanges a sign of normalizing U.S.-Russia energy collaboration in the Arctic?

But as reporters raised their hands at the close of Trump’s remarks, both men ignored them and exited abruptly.

One Last Crossing

To many of the national and international reporters who flew to Anchorage for the summit, the Arctic was unfamiliar ground—few could even place the Bering Strait on a map.

That struck Orville, who remembered how, during his military service, people often mistook him for anything but what he was: Iñupiaq.
“They don’t know anything about us,” he said.

Even fewer grasp the role Iñupiat and Yupik peoples have played in keeping peace across the strait.

“It was the Indigenous people, many of whom live in the Bering Strait region, who pressed the national government to see long-lost relatives after the Cold War,” recalled Ramseur, an aide to then-Governor Steve Cowper. Together they joined the 1988 Friendship Flight from Nome to Provideniya which briefly reopened the Iron Curtain, reuniting families, and symbolizing a thaw in U.S.–Soviet relations.

Decades later, Ramseur says he still thinks about that trip.

“Just that whole era. It was amazing,” he said, noting how a dozen sister-city relationships born in that moment have since withered under Putin. “I hope somebody picks it up. We’re all getting old.”

Orville, who will turn 90 next year, feels that truth in his bones, though his mind remains sharp. He remembers the last time he saw his Russian relatives in the 1970s, when the Soviets briefly relaxed the Diomede border.

“And then one day they just closed it again, like before,” he said, pausing at his dining room window.

“It’s been a long time.”

Now, he isn’t sure which of his relatives across the strait are still alive. But he still dreams of another reunion — one last crossing in his lifetime.