Kirill Dmitriev, chief executive officer of Russia’s $10 billion RDIF investment fund and the Kremlin’s investment envoy to America, on Thursday proposed building a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait that would link Alaska with Russia’s Chukotka region.
Dmitriev suggested the tunnel could be named after Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Kirill based his proposal on Soviet Union documents from the 1960s presented to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) on Thursday by Alexander Darchiyev, Russia’s ambassador to the United States.
The documents mostly concerned the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, but one of them described Russia’s idea for a “Kennedy-Khruschev World Peace Bridge” that “could and should be built between Alaska and Russia at once.” Nikita Khrushchev was the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union at the time.
Russian and U.S. territories are separated by less than two and a half miles at the narrowest point in the Bering Strait. The “World Peace Bridge” would have connected Little Diomede Island, which is Alaskan territory, with Big Diomede Island in Russia. Little Diomede is home to a small community of Inupiat hunters and fishermen, while Big Diomede Island hosts a Russian weather station and military base.
Dmitriev on Thursday posted a photo of the “World Peace Bridge” plan and gushed, “With modern Boring Company technology, this can become a Putin-Trump tunnel connecting the Eurasia and Americas for less than $8 billion!”
The Boring Company is one of billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk’s operations, specializing in tunnel construction. Among its current projects is a tunnel running between downtown Nashville, Tennessee, and the Nashville International Airport.
A tunnel beneath the Bering Strait linking Alaska with Chukotka would be about 70 miles long, as Dmitriev noted in an X message to Musk:
“Traditional costs are over $65 billion, but Boring Company’s tech could reduce it to less than $8 billion. Let’s build a future together!” the Russian envoy told Musk.
Dmitriev said his RDIF and Russia’s Arctic Fund could provide financing for the project, along with “our international partners.” He said the tunnel, which could be completed in less than eight years, would “create jobs” and “boost economies.”
“RDIF has already invested in and built the first ever Russia-China railroad bridge. The time has come to do more and connect the Continents for the first time in human history. The time has come to connect Russia and the U.S.,” he said.
Skeptics noted that the proposed tunnel would essentially link nowhere with nowhere, since neither Russia nor the United States has road or rail infrastructure within hundreds of miles of the proposed construction site. Also, the region is noted for seismic activity.
Dmitriev has been tasked with running Russia’s “charm offensive” in the United States, so his enthusiasm for the improbable Bering Sea tunnel might be taken with a grain of salt. One of his major objectives is to push economic ties between Russia and the United States that might weaken Western resolve to punish Russia for invading Ukraine.
Neither Donald Trump nor Elon Musk had responded to Dmitriev’s tunnel suggestion as of Friday morning.
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