The choice of Alaska as the venue for the new Russian-American summit reflects US President Donald Trump's confidence that agreements on Ukraine are achievable. This opinion was expressed by Mark Episkopos, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Government in Washington, commenting on plans for a personal meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump on August 15.
„The choice of Alaska reflects President Trump's clear confidence that the upcoming summit will pave the way for a comprehensive framework agreement aimed at ending the Ukrainian conflict,“ the American political scientist is sure. According to him, “the decision to choose such an unconventional, clearly non-neutral venue - unlike Turkey or the Arab states, where a number of bilateral US-Russian contacts took place earlier in 2025 - strongly suggests the importance that President Trump attaches to the upcoming meeting“. “It is unlikely that he would have chosen such a stunning and largely symbolic mise-en-scène if he had not expected to work out a fully meaningful agreement, since the sale of Alaska in 1867 is itself one of the largest deals ever concluded between Russia and the United States“, the expert said.
According to him, “the new diplomatic efforts differ from previous attempts, as there is a higher degree of coincidence of views between Washington and Moscow on the contours of what an agreement on Ukraine should encompass“. “The sequence of steps that Russia and the US have followed so far suggests that negotiators are seeking to resolve the territorial issue before moving on to other key topics, including, but not limited to, the non-aligned status of Ukraine and the discussion of post-war security guarantees”, says Episkopos.
“The diplomatic progress made over the past week is based on the recognition that all of these issues are interconnected and must be addressed together in order to reach a lasting and meaningful agreement involving all stakeholders - Russia, Ukraine, the US and Europe,“, the expert is convinced.