The US State Department has dismissed reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin's revanchism could reach as far as Alaska after the Kremlin issued a new decree on historic Russian real estate holdings abroad.
“I speak for all of us in the U.S. government and say he certainly won’t get it back,” State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said with a laugh during a news conference Monday when asked about Moscow’s alleged claim to Alaska .
Putin signed a new measure last week directing and funding the presidential administration and the Foreign Ministry in “searching for real estate in the Russian Federation, the former Russian Empire, the former USSR, the proper registration of rights… and the legal protection of this property.” .”
The scope and intent of the measure are unclear. Newsweek emailed the Kremlin for comment.
Ultranationalist bloggers used the vaguely worded document to call for new Russian aggression against countries that now once control Russian land, including the United States, NATO countries in Eastern and Central Europe and several Central Asian states.
Russian President Vladimir Putin at an awards ceremony on January 16, 2024 in Odintsovo. Putin ordered authorities to collect information about Russian assets abroad. Contributor/Getty Images
Pro-Ukrainian social media accounts, meanwhile, falsely claimed that Putin used the decree to declare Russia's sale of Alaska to the US in 1867 illegal or illegitimate.
Newsweek reached out to the State Department and White House via email seeking comment on Putin's decree.
The Russian president had previously said his compatriots should “not be upset” by the “cheap” deal, although his allies have also suggested Moscow could reopen the matter as a territorial dispute.
Dmitry Medvedev – a former Russian president and prime minister who was once considered a potential successor to Putin before being sidelined – also joked about Moscow's supposed claim to Alaska in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“That’s it then.” wrote Medvedev, who was once seen as a technocratic, liberal counterweight to Putin but is now trying to reinvent himself as an ultra-hawkish proponent of war against Ukraine. “We waited every day for it to be returned. Now war is inevitable,” Medvedev added, ending his post with a laughing emoji.
Revanchism is at the core of Putin's neo-tsarist Russian state and one of the driving forces behind Moscow's repeated aggression against Ukraine over the last decade, be it in Crimea, the eastern Donbass region in 2014 or its claimed annexation of large parts of the south and of the south of Eastern Ukraine in 2022.
In 2021, Putin published a long essay in which he stated that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians were virtually all one people and rejected the concept of an independent Ukrainian nation.
“Step by step, Ukraine was drawn into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia,” Putin wrote, as Russian forces began a major deployment along the Ukrainian border Borders began.
“Inevitably there came a time when the concept of 'Ukraine is not Russia' was no longer an option. There was a need for an 'anti-Russia' concept that we will never accept,” he said.
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Newsweek strives to challenge conventional wisdom and find connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek strives to challenge conventional wisdom and find connections in the search for common ground.