Vladimir Putin is seeking to woo Donald Trump with an £6 billion plan to build a tunnel joining Russia and America. The scheme has been floated as the Kremlin ruler desperately seeks to block the US President from supplying “game-changing” Tomahawk long-range missiles to Ukraine.
The scheme for a “Putin-Trump Tunnel” named after the presidents was floated by Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) or sovereign wealth fund, and a close family friend of the Russian dictator’s increasingly influential daughter Katerina Tikhonova, 39. Elon Musk’s The Boring Company would be involved in drilling the tunnel, Mr Dmitriev said, who is part of the Russian team supposedly negotiating an end to the war. “Imagine connecting the US and Russia, America and Afro-Eurasia, with a Putin-Trump tunnel – a 70-mile route symbolising unity,” he said.
The closest point between the two countries is across the bleak Bering Strait. At its narrowest, it is only 51 miles separating Cape Prince of Wales in Alaska and Cape Dezhnev, in Russia’s furthest-flung province, Chukotka. Yet there is a huge gulf between the relatively affluent Alaska and the impoverished whaling region of Chukotka.
“Using modern technologies from The Boring Company, this could become the Putin-Trump tunnel connecting Eurasia and America, [and built] for less than $8 billion,” said Mr Dmitriev.
Russia evidently hopes the vanity project might appeal to Mr Trump as President Putin fights to stop US long-range Tomahawks going to Ukraine.
“The RDIF has already invested in and built the first-ever railway bridge between Russia and China,” he said. “It’s time to do more and connect continents for the first time in human history. It’s time to connect Russia and the United States.”
Mr Dmitriev claimed: “This would not only change global trade, it would change everything for the better,” claiming that the tunnel could be completed in eight years – by which time Mr Trump would be 87 and Mr Putin 81.
In theory, such a scheme could see the world-famous Trans Siberian Railway extended to North America. In fact, such plans are not new. and US expansionist William Gilpin floated a world-girdling railway including a Bering crossing. Joseph Strauss – later chief engineer on the Golden Gate Bridge – sketched a rail bridge concept and presented it to Imperial Russia. Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, also eyed the grandiose project before he was toppled in 1917 and murdered by the Bolsheviks the following year.
The scheme was revived by the US in the 1960s – amid the Cold War – envisioned as the Kennedy-Khrushchev Peace Bridge, but it came to nothing amid American superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union.
Two islands on the route Russia’s Ratmanov Island (Big Diomede) and America’s Little Diomede (Krusenstern Island) – are just two and a half miles apart. If both are used as bridging points, the tunnel could be made in several stages.
This comes as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky will head to the White House on Friday (October 17) for a crucial meeting with Mr Trump. Hours earlier, the US president said he had agreed to another summit with Vladimir Putin in Budapest after a “very productive” call. The possible supply of US Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine is expected to be at the top of the agenda during Mr Zelensky’s visit.