this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
302 points (96.6% liked)
memes
10405 readers
2237 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Vladivostok is barely the closest populated Russian area. Even among major cities, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is significantly closer, not to mention Anadyr and other smaller ones. Besides, if Alaska would remain Russian, you bet there would be more connections. They just don't make much sense in the current realities.
Russia has the technologies and infrastructure for efficient resource extraction under extreme conditions, and some of those resources (for example, nickel) are primarily located inside the Arctic circle. Moreover, under American leadership Alaska has still been one of the resource extraction hubs, with up to 2 million barrels of oil produced per day at peak, and about 500 thousand currently, 17 metric tons of gold currently produced per year (and expected to grow), etc. etc.
Its a major base of operations for the Russian Pacific fleet.
Now, sure. And France has the technology and infrastructure to extract resources from the Mississippi delta region now. But the Alaska purchase was in 1867. Russians were still trying to secure territory on their own continent during this time. Repeated wars with Japan, the Ottomans, and with domestic insurgencies plagued the country through the 19th century.
And Alaska was already being filibustered by western colonialists as far back as the early 1800s, necessitating a Treaty (the Russo-American Treaty of 1824) to settle an ongoing dispute over territory (The Oregon Boundary Dispute) that Russians had little capacity or real interest in prosecuting. Much like with the Louisiana Purchase, this was a token transfer intended to get some kind of compensation to relinquish a claim the Russians were poised to lose one way or another.