Vladimir Putin’s loyalists have set their sights on Alaska, making threats to grab the territory back from America.
The threats are in response to calls for Western nations to sell Russian assets as punishment for the war in Ukraine.
The US purchased Alaska from Tsar Alexander II in 1867 for $7.2 million, and it became a state in 1959.
Now, Russia’s most senior parliamentarian Vyacheslav Volodin has warned that nation could claim the territory back.
‘Decency is not weakness,’ said the speaker of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament.
‘We always have something to answer with.
‘Let America always remember, there is part of its territory… Alaska.’
‘When they start trying to dispose of our resources abroad, let them think before they do so that we also have something to get back.’
He ordered other MPs to ‘keep an eye on Alaska’.
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The calls come after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky urged the West to sell Russian assets to pay for the recovery of Ukraine’s war-ravaged economy.
‘We are not interfering in their internal affairs, but they have been saying for decades that everything that is happening with them, the elections of all presidents, all that is because Russia is interfering,’ Mr Volodin added.
Another MP Pyotr Tolstoy, the great-great-grandson of writer Leo Tolstoy and deputy speaker of the Kremlin-obedient parliament, has proposed holding a referendum on Alaska.
A similar tactic was carried out in Crimea under the purview of the Russian military, resulting in a majority for joining Russia.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, triggered the most serious crisis in relations between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
After failing to seize the capital Kyiv early on in the invasion the Kremlin has since focussed its efforts on waging a war of attrition for Ukraine’s Donbas region, parts of which are controlled by Russian separatist proxies.
On Sunday, Putin claimed his biggest victory when Ukrainian forces withdrew from Luhansk province.
Russian forces then launched an offensive to take neighbouring Donetsk province. Donetsk and Luhansk comprise the Donbas.
Russia says it wants to wrest control of the eastern and heavily industrial region on behalf of Moscow-backed separatists in two self-proclaimed people’s republics.
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