Trump-Putin meeting: Sprawling Army base that has hosted dignitaries is backdrop for talks

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President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s high stakes summit on Aug. 15 will take place at a sprawling U.S. military base in Anchorage, Alaska, a White House official confirmed to Paste BN.

The face-to-face meeting, billed as a “listening exercise” by the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, will be held at the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, spread over 13,000 square acres, to discuss Russia’s three-year war on Ukraine.

“The goal of this meeting for the president is to walk away with a better understanding of how we can end this war,” Leavitt told reporters during a news briefing on Aug. 12.

The meeting, which was announced last week, will be the first time in four years that a U.S. president has met Putin since the war began.

Putin and former President Joe Biden met only once during his presidency – in Geneva in June 2021.

Military base located in Alaska's largest city

Anchorage is Alaska’s largest city and home to 300,000 people. Its capital city of Juneau, which is 570 miles from Anchorage, is currently under evacuation orders following glacial outburst flooding.

Anchorage’s northern edge abuts Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, an installation that teems with airmen, soldiers -- plenty of moose and bears, too, befitting its location near Alaska’s vast stretches of black spruce-fringed wilderness.

Cold, dark and snowy in the winter, the base gets near round-the-clock sun in the peak of summer.

It’s a prime midway rest stop for dignitaries, like presidents and cabinet secretaries, on the route from Washington to eastern Asia. The roughly eight-hour flight from the east coast to the southern coast of Alaska takes about eight hours, about the limit for air crews before mandated rest and a convenient, secure location to refuel.

The Army established the base in 1940 in the runup to World War II. Since then, it has hosted soldiers and airmen along with smaller contingents from the Navy and Marine Corps. The joint base hosts about 30,000 service members, their family members and civilian employees.

Its strategic location – near Russia and close to Arctic resources eyed by the Chinese – has made Elmendorf-Richardson and other Alaskan military installations increasingly valuable to the Pentagon. More personnel and money have been streaming into Alaska in recent years to bolster northern defenses. The base takes part in some of the military’s most intricate annual war games, featuring its most sophisticated weapons like the F-22 fighter.

In recent years, Alaska’s strategic, remote location has exposed its vulnerabilities. Suicide among soldiers spiked to alarming levels, and reporting by Paste BN revealed a shortage of mental personnel to help them. The Army and Congress intervened, dispatching dozens of counselors and spending millions to improve living conditions for troops there.

Chinese spies have also made several attempts to gain access to Alaskan bases, Paste BN has reported. The bases contain some of the military’s top-end weaponry, radars to track potential attacks on the homeland and missiles to intercept them.

Zelenskyy and European leaders hold a call with Trump

Meanwhile, Trump held a virtual meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders on Aug. 13, two days before the summit with Putin.

Zelenskyy arrived in Berlin on Aug. 13 for a virtual conference hosted by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that will include leaders of NATO members Finland, France, Great Britain, Italy, Poland and the European Union. Vice President JD Vance was also part of the meeting.

Earlier in the day, Zelenskyy said there should be a meeting of the three leaders as the location of the meeting was announced on Aug. 13.

He also said he was not seeing any positive indications from Russia.

"At present, there is no sign that the Russians are preparing to end the war, "Zelenskyy wrote on X. "Our coordinated efforts and joint actions – of Ukraine, the United States, Europe, and all countries that seek peace – can definitely compel Russia to make peace."

Contributing: Reuters

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for Paste BN. You can follow her on X @SwapnaVenugopal