President Donald Trump appeared to mix up Russia with Alaska ahead of his meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, during a White House press conference about crime in Washington, DC and his plans to deploy the National Guard and put the city’s police under his control.
Trump delivered the news from the podium in the press briefing room — joined by Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and newly confirmed DC U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro — where he decried the level of crime in Washington, DC.
“This is a tragic emergency, and it’s embarrassing for me to be up here,” Trump told reporters. “You know, I’m going to see Putin. I’m going to Russia on Friday. I don’t like being up here, talking about how unsafe and how dirty and disgusting this once-beautiful capital [is].”
Trump is not going to Russia, but rather to Alaska to meet with Putin. He is set to meet with the Russian president to discuss bringing an end to the war in Ukraine that Russia initiated when it invaded the sovereign nation in February 2022.
“The highly anticipated meeting between myself, as President of the United States of America, and President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, will take place next Friday, August 15, 2025, in the Great State of Alaska,” Trump posted last week on Truth Social.
The meeting will be the first between a US president and Putin since 2021, when Joe Biden met the Russian president in Switzerland. It’s also the first time Putin has been to the US in a decade. This comes despite the fact that Putin is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
Last week, Alaska’s senior Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski expressed her concern, but also cautious optimism, about the meeting taking place in Alaska.
“President Trump announced he will meet with President Putin in Alaska next Friday to continue negotiations to end Russia’s catastrophic war in Ukraine,” Murkowski, a supporter of Ukraine, said in a statement.
“This is another opportunity for the Arctic to serve as a venue that brings together world leaders to forge meaningful agreements. While I remain deeply wary of Putin and his regime, I hope these discussions lead to genuine progress and help end the war on equitable terms.”
Critics of the announcement flagged the fact that Russia once claimed Alaska at the beginning of the 1770s and had native Alaskans hunt fur for Russians, before the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867.
Russians, for their part, hailed the decision to have the summit in Alaska.
“Born as Russian America — Orthodox roots, forts, fur trade — Alaska echoes those ties and makes the U.S. an Arctic nation,” Russia’s special economic envoy Kirill Dmitriev said in a statement on X (formerly Twitter).
Meanwhile, Konstantin Malofeyev — a billionaire sanctioned by the Obama administration for funding Russian separatists — said Alaskans “respectfully remember their Russian past and their Orthodox present.”
Trump said he wanted to see a meeting take place between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But he also expressed his frustration with Zelensky.
“I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelensky was saying, ‘Well, I have to get constitutional approval,’” Trump said.
“He’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap, because there’ll be some land-swapping going on. I know that through Russia, and through conversations with everybody. To the good, for the good of Ukraine — good stuff, not bad stuff; also some bad stuff for both.”
Trump said the negotiations would be very complex.
“And the word that they will use is, you know, they make changes,” he said. “We’re going to change the lines, the battle lines they need. But I want to have a meeting set up between the two leaders.”
Trump has found the war in Ukraine to be one of his most vexing problems. In the past, he said he could end it within 24 hours. But despite his antagonistic attitude toward Zelensky and Ukraine, he has at times been frustrated with Putin and has continued to deliver arms to Ukraine.
Gustaf Kilander and Rhian Lubin contributed to this report
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