On August 15, Archbishop Alexei of Sitka and Alaska of the Orthodox Church in America met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a military cemetery in Alaska and exchanged pleasantries and gifts. Putin was in Alaska, which the Russian Empire sold to the United States in 1867, to meet with President Donald Trump about the fate of Ukraine. Images and video of the meeting were posted on the English-language Kremlin website and Russian Foreign Ministry Facebook page. An extended video of the encounter appeared on the website and YouTube page of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Kremlin-controlled tabloid with millions of readers. As of August 21, the video had 670,000 views. The archbishop told Putin that he tries to go to Russia yearly: “It’s of great benefit to my priests and my seminarians. For them, when they go to Russia, they say, ‘I’ve been home. I’ve come home.” Putin, smiling, responded: “You are always a welcome guest in Russia, and please feel at home.”
Many found the scene in Anchorage deeply unsettling, especially the images of Archbishop Alexei kissing icons in the hands of Putin, which the hierarch explained in the letter as reverence for the saints, not approval of the Russian leader. Others, especially on social media, praised it as a sign of reconciliation between Russia and the United States. Archbishop Alexei received icons from Putin of St. Herman of Alaska and the Dormition of the Theotokos and gave Putin an icon from Mount Athos.
When challenged, the Archbishop explained in a letter to his clergy that he had the best intentions. History and Kremlin propaganda have shown that those good intentions could be used to dangerous ends.
“When I expressed gratitude in that public moment, it was not praise for present politics, but a remembrance of the missionaries of earlier generations – Saint Herman, Saint Innocent, Saint Yakov, and others – who brought us the Orthodox faith at great cost,” he wrote in a letter addressed to those disturbed by his meeting with Putin. “Their sacrifice is our inheritance, and for that spiritual gift we must always give thanks.”
The Moscow Patriarchate granted autocephaly to the OCA in 1970, enshrining a respectful relationship. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, an Orthodox country that also has deep ties to America and the OCA, is in its twelfth year, the full-scale invasion in its fourth, and has created a new reality.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023 for the kidnapping of children from the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. The ICC issued a warrant on the same day for the same crime for the arrest of Maria Lvova-Belova, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights under Putin, who has spoken of personally adopting an orphaned teenager from unlawfully occupied Mariupol. Lvova-Belova was also in the media for her personal life. Last year she left her husband, a Russian Orthodox priest with whom she was raising ten children, to marry Konstantin Malofeev, an Orthodox oligarch who is sanctioned for funding Kremlin operations in eastern Ukraine. Malofeev is also instrumental in funding and promoting connections with American evangelical groups advancing the “family values” agenda. He is one of the primary financial backers of the “Russian World” project championed by Patriarch Kirill.
The Russian Orthodox Church has been used as a justification and weapon throughout Russia’s operations in Ukraine. Priests who refuse to read Patriarch Kirill’s “Prayer for Holy Rus” in support of the full-scale invasion have been defrocked and forced to leave Russia; some have been arrested and prosecuted. None of this was addressed in the short video of the discussion between Archbishop Alexei and Putin, nor in Alexei’s letter.
While there are centuries of spirituality and missionaries linking Russia and America via Alaska from the 18th century, forming the basis of the Orthodox Church in America, there is also a clear line of recent Russian interest in Alaska for broader reasons. Russian-American organizations became active in the 1990s and pursued American connections. The US government sponsored exchanges. Academic and government departments in Russia are devoted to studying the links between Russia and America.
In 2017, the 150th anniversary of the sale of Alaska, an American delegation including members of the Alaska Historical Society and St. Herman’s Theological Seminary travelled to Russia for a conference at Yesenin Ryazan State University titled “The Echo of Russian American: Historical and Cultural Heritage.” Recent archival findings have established the Ryazan region as St. Herman’s birthplace. Russia’s Foreign Ministry announced the conference in a press release. Ryazan is a military center that is central to Russia’s war effort against Ukraine and has been targeted by Ukrainian drones.
Archbishop Alexei, who spent ten years as a monk at Mount Athos and over a dozen in Thessaloniki before returning to the US and being made Bishop Alexis of Bethesda, Locum Tenens of Sitka and Alaska, travelled to Russia for the first time in 2021, on an official nine-day visit representing the OCA, which has continued to send delegations to Russia even after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Metropolitan Tikhon of the OCA concelebrated the Divine Liturgy at the St. Nicholas Patriarchal Cathedral in New York in April 2024. The service marked the Feast of the Annunciation of the Theotokos on the Julian Calendar and the 100th anniversary of the repose of Saint Tikhon, who served as bishop in America before returning to Russia and becoming the first Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in two hundred years. Guests in attendance, according to a news release by the Patriarchal Parishes in the USA, included New York City officials dealing with faith issues, the Russian Ambassador Alexander Darchiev, members of the Russian diplomatic corps, and Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, who regularly justifies Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine at UN meetings.
True to his expressed affinity for Russia, Archbishop Alexei has been going there frequently. In September 2024, he led a pilgrimage to Siberia. During the trip, he spoke at the local history museum about Orthodoxy in Alaska and participated in a roundtable held by the regional administration of Irkutsk, the birthplace of St. Innocent.
In one of his interviews, the Archbishop mentioned his most recent visit to Russia in May 2025 on the occasion of the namesday of Patriarch Kirill. On May 24, he was among the celebrants at the Patriarchal Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow.
In the run-up to the Alaska summit, Russian state-controlled media and social media ran an array of interviews with Archbishop Alexei. Among them was an interview he gave to Russia Today (RT), which broadcasts Kremlin propaganda to English-speaking audiences. The archbishop told RT: “Alaska is where Russia and America meet, not as rivals on a map, but as neighbors who have lived side by side.” He also spoke of the three days of prayer that he called for before the summit, both to the Russian saints and the newly canonized St. Olga of Alaska. The anchor said to him, “We know that President Putin is a deeply religious man.” Alexei responded: “Faith refines the conscience, to start with. Faith teaches people to look at other people as being in the image of God. It teaches us not to look at others as enemies first, but as neighbors. From the point of view of the bishop, the king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord, as is said by the wise Solomon. We pray as far as possible for the Gospel to guide leaders towards peace.”
Archbishop Alexei also spoke, as he has in many interviews, of the Russian Orthodox missionaries’ defense of the native people of Alaska. In other talks, he has contrasted that to the abuse they faced from Protestant missionaries after the sale of Alaska. The current Russian narrative has embraced the first part to Russia’s credit, failing to note the exploitation of Alaska’s indigenous population by the Russian-American Company.
In an April 2024 interview with Pravoslavie.ru, a site run by Moscow Sretensky Monastery, Archbishop Alexei described the importance of the wonder-working Sitka Mother of God: “This icon was made in St. Petersburg, but it became one of the most important Orthodox shrines in North America. It gives peace. It was brought to Alaska by employees of the Russian-American Company, most of whom were Russian. But it also became the Mother of the Native American peoples. So from the very beginning, this image united our countries and became a treasure for both the United States and Russia.” Another Russian Orthodox site, Monastery.ru, published a translation in 2024 of his article about the importance of head coverings for women, which he promotes as a “helmet of salvation.” The tract has been published by Peter Heers, a self-identified clergyman and an online preacher of “traditional values” who is not recognized by any canonical jurisdiction. Heers, like Alexei, has also studied in Thessaloniki, and they have collaborated on several book projects.
Pravoslavie.ru broadcast a nearly half-hour interview with the archbishop on the eve of the Trump-Putin meeting, posted on the site’s English-language version as well.
Archbishop Alexei told Russia’s main Channel One state television, in a report broadcast on August 17 after the Putin-Trump meeting, that Fyodor Dostoyevky’s “Brothers Karamazov” had brought him to Orthodoxy. In the report, he points to an old map in which Alaska is labelled Russian America.
The New York Times reported in 2017 that the Russian head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, said on a Crimean television channel: “If Russia was in possession of Alaska today, the geopolitical situation in the world would have been different.”
Russian agents and officials have also attempted to claim by name an indigenous site in Hawaii, resisting efforts to change its name from Fort Elizabeth to Paʻulaʻula State Historic Site. Hawaii was a short-lived outpost for the Russian-American company in the early 19th century.
The Orthodox Church in America, because of its American roots, is potentially of greater interest than the once vehemently anti-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, which united with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007, four years after Putin met with hierarchs and leading members of the church in 2003. Archbishop Alexei’s meeting with Putin has placed the Orthodox Church in America at the center of Russian discussions about Alaska and set the stage for potentially broader targeting of the church for Kremlin interests, while Putin shows no sign of ending Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.