ANCHORAGE — Of the millions of Ukrainians driven from their homes by Russia’s invasion, 1,000 have ended up in, of all places, Alaska. They found work in fisheries and bakeries, learned to drive the snowbound winter roads and cobbled together new lives near the top of the world.
Now, they are watching with a mixture of hope and unease as the man who led the attack on their homeland, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, arrives in the state where they found refuge, to meet with President Donald Trump on Friday at a military base in Anchorage.
“It’s difficult to accept that he’s going to be here,” Liudmyla Stretovych, who left Ukraine two weeks after Russia invaded in February 2022, said of Putin. “We lived through a lot of pain because of him.”
All of Alaska is abuzz about the summit, with residents trading gossip about spotting Secret Service agents at coffee shops, while state officials figure out whether to shut down roads for security and cope with airspace closures during Alaska’s peak summer tourism season.
But Alaska’s recent Ukrainian arrivals said Putin’s looming visit had jolted them on a deeper level, bringing a war that is never far from their minds right into their backyards.
Stretovych, 42, and her two children spent the first days of the war in early 2022 huddled in the basement of their apartment building in Kyiv before deciding to flee. They came to the United States under a Biden-era program called Uniting for Ukraine, which enabled 240,000 Ukrainians to live and work in the United States before Trump paused new applications shortly after taking office.
Family connections brought them to Anchorage, where Stretovych found work as a supermarket florist and an Uber driver. Her 7-year-old son has taken up tae kwon do, while her 15-year-old daughter joined the high school volleyball team.
But Stretovych cannot feel fully settled in Alaska as long as the war grinds on. Her mother still lives in Ukraine, and one of her cousins, a soldier, was killed in the conflict, she said.
“It’s hard,” she said. “I want this war to stop.”
Several immigrants said they planned to stay away from pro-Ukraine demonstrations that are planned for Thursday and Friday around Anchorage, worried about doing anything that might jeopardize their immigration status as the Trump administration unravels government protections for people fleeing conflict. Several Ukrainians in Alaska have already had to leave the country because their legal status expired, according to local advocacy groups.
Instead, Alaska’s Ukrainians have quietly discussed their hopes and concerns about the summit at Bible-study groups, or when they talk to relatives back home. They gathered Sunday at a local Russian-Ukrainian church to pray for peace.
“I can’t worry about the geopolitics,” said Yuliia Maiba, 31, who left Ukraine in December 2023 with her twin daughters, who are now 8 years old. “The only thing I’m worried about is my family, that they’re alive.”
Maiba first came to Alaska as a 15-year-old foreign-exchange student, and her host family offered to take her in again after Russia invaded in February 2022.
“It wasn’t my dream to come back,” she allowed, but the worsening violence and the toll on her daughters forced the family to leave. They moved into a small apartment attached to the home of Maiba’s host family. She has found work teaching English to other immigrants and doing job training with New Chance United Relief Program, a local nonprofit serving many local Ukrainians.
Zori Opanasevych, the group’s executive director, helped organize flights and sponsorships that brought hundreds of new Ukrainian families to Alaska. She said many are now in limbo, with their legal status at risk of lapsing.
“They’re trying to focus on their lives here, invest in their jobs, learn English and focus on a positive life,” said Opanasevych, whose family immigrated to Alaska in the 1990s.
Since the summit was announced, she has daydreamed about what would happen if she bumped into Putin on the streets of Anchorage. What would she say? And since President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine was not invited, Opanasevych said she wanted to attend so someone could speak for Alaska’s Ukrainians.
Alaska’s leaders have welcomed the summit, saying it highlights the state’s geopolitical importance in the Arctic.
“I think the state’s excited about the summit,” Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican and a Trump ally, said in an interview. “We like to believe that Alaska is at the center of the world. We’re closer to Moscow than maybe Washington is. It just makes sense from a geography perspective, from a political perspective.”
But a variety of Alaskans have expressed misgivings. Some grumbled that the security demands of hosting two presidents would strain resources at a moment when Alaska’s airports and cruise-ship docks are jammed with tourists, and a melting glacier is flooding parts of the state capital, Juneau.
In Anchorage, liberal residents are protesting the summit by hanging Ukrainian flags outside their homes and draping banners in support of Ukraine from roadside bridges. Some joked that they worried that Trump might sell Alaska back to Russia to secure a deal on Ukraine.
And some Alaska Native leaders said they had been entirely left out of the planning and discussions about a summit occurring on their ancestral land.
“We should be at the dinner table, not the servant,” said Faye Ewan, an elder from the village of Kluti-Kaah at Copper Center, about 200 miles east of Anchorage.
Some Ukrainians were not optimistic that Trump would reach any acceptable accord with Putin, whom they denounced as an unrepentant war criminal who has kept bombing Ukraine despite previous rounds of talks.
“We know what Putin wants,” said Olha Korol, who fled the Ukrainian city of Dnipro early in the war with her husband and three children, and now works as a hair stylist in Alaska. “He wants more, more and more of territory, of Ukraine.”
But Svitlana Shyrinian, 55, said she had to stay hopeful. She fled Ukraine with her two daughters early in the war, taking only a small suitcase in the hopes that they would be home in two weeks.
A corporate lawyer in Ukraine, she now works as a cashier at a deli in Anchorage weighing out sausages and selling sauerkraut to fellow Ukrainians. Lately, the summit has been on everyone’s mind. She said she could not allow herself to be cynical.
“I always have hope,” she said. “How else can you make dreams, if there’s no peace?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. c.2025 The New York Times Company
