Russia’s appetite for its past has always been ravenous.  Nothing illustrates it better than Moscow’s fixation on Alaska, a fixation less about America’s frontier than about Ukraine’s survival. When Trump hosted Vladimir Putin in Anchorage last month, the American side framed it as pragmatism, a chance to restart dialogue. The Russian side treated it as a homecoming. Putin’s aide Yury Ushakov even called Alaska a “logical” venue because U.S. and Russian interests “intersect in Alaska and the Arctic.” In Moscow’s telling, the real logic was imperial: that America had agreed to meet Russia on ground it once ruled. Symbolism, though, is never innocent. Days after the summit, Putin spoke of “light at the end of the tunnel” in U.S.–Russia relations, stressing possible cooperation in the Arctic and even in Alaska. At the very moment Russia was promising partnership in Anchorage, it was pounding Kharkiv with missiles. What it cloaks in nostalgia in Alaska, it unleashes as destruction in Ukraine. This is why the rhetoric matters. Alaska is the rehearsal; Ukraine is the performance. When Russian politicians insist the 1867 sale was a lease, or when television anchors bluster “Alaska is ours,” they are not fantasizing about the Bering Strait. They are normalizing the notion that sovereignty is provisional, and that history can be reopened whenever convenient. And Ukraine has already lived the consequences. Crimea began as a joke, then a slogan, then a policy, and finally an invasion. Under Trump’s presidency, Russia has sensed room to test this theater further. Talk of reopening U.S. investment in the Sakhalin-1 project, with Russian officials declaring themselves “ready to deepen discussions,” is cast as pragmatism. Yet they risk softening the line that should be unbending: No cooperation is normal while Ukraine’s borders are being shredded. Economic overtures are not separate from imperial ambitions; they are their velvet glove. Russian state media has seized the optics. Commentators praised the Alaska summit as proof that Putin had “restored Russia’s status as a superpower” and forced America to meet him on “former Russian soil.” The more America indulges this theater, the more Moscow believes it has license to rewrite not just its past but Ukraine’s future. For Ukraine, the relevance could not be clearer. The rhetoric of Alaska is the same logic that annexed Crimea in the name of “historical justice” and seized Donetsk and Luhansk as “ancestral soil.” Former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul noted that Russian nationalists equate the “loss” of Alaska with the “loss” of Ukraine — both seen as humiliations to be corrected. Political scientist Sam Greene has warned that even symbolic discussions of Alaska validate the idea that territorial ownership is flexible. For Ukrainians, flexibility means occupation. These imagined returns extend beyond Ukraine or the theater of Alaska. In Georgia, Russia has occupied 20 percent of the country’s territory since the 2008 war, keeping around 10,000 troops in Abkhazia and South Ossetia while blocking NATO membership. In Moldova, it sustains 1,500 soldiers in Transnistria and uses Gazprom’s dominance to punish pro-European governments. Kazakhstan, with 3.5 million ethnic Russians, is routinely warned by Russian deputies that its borders are “artificial” and “temporary.” Belarus has become virtually a protectorate since the 2020 protests, reliant on Kremlin loans and energy, while hosting Russian nuclear weapons since 2023. In Central Asia, Moscow keeps 7,000 troops at its base in Tajikistan, controls Kyrgyzstan’s debt, and leverages migrant workers whose remittances account for 30 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP and nearly half of Tajikistan’s. Armenia, weakened by defeats in 2020 and 2023, remains tied to Russia’s security umbrella. Even in the Balkans, the Kremlin exploits Orthodox ties and arms sales to Serbia while financing Bosnian separatists in Republika Srpska to obstruct NATO and EU integration. The pattern is consistent: Moscow refuses to accept sovereignty in its former empire as permanent. The Alaska fixation has long served as a practice ground for this mentality. In 2022, Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin warned Washington that if Russian assets were frozen, Moscow might “claim Alaska.” Billboards soon appeared across Siberia declaring “Alaska is ours.” In 2023 and 2024, propagandist Vladimir Solovyov demanded that Finland, Poland, Moldova — and Alaska — be “returned to the Russian Empire,” while Olga Skabeyeva referred to “our Alaska” on state television. Even Dmitry Medvedev, once touted as a reformer, sneered that Russia had been waiting for Alaska to be “handed back any day now” and that war with America was “unavoidable.” No one imagines Russian troops wading across the Bering Strait. But the habit of speech reveals the psychology of aggression: Nothing lost is ever lost forever. That psychology is what Ukrainians face daily. To them, Alaska talk is not comedy but a reminder of the logic that drives the missiles overhead. What America hears as trolling, Ukraine endures as tragedy. The Kremlin’s appetite for imagined returns is not confined to history books. It is lived reality on Europe’s battlefields. If the U.S. government under Trump allows this narrative to slide — if it treats Alaska talk as trolling, or accepts the symbolism as harmless — it risks undermining Ukraine by signaling that revisionist claims can be entertained. The danger is not that Alaska will be taken, but that Ukraine will be traded. And the Kremlin would happily dress such a trade as the correction of history. Alaska is not coming back to Russia. But the fact that Moscow keeps saying otherwise shows how deeply it relies on grievance as policy. What sounds ridiculous in Anchorage is murderous in Mariupol. America should recognize the link. To indulge fantasies anywhere is to invite their application everywhere. Ukraine’s fight is not just against Russian troops; it is against the very idea that the past is negotiable. If that idea is not stopped in Ukraine, it will not stop with Ukraine. READ MORE: The Ukrainian Refugee Crisis: We Need Them Back Why Trump and Zelensky Don’t Get Along