US-Russia thaw trials, a tunnel under the Bering Strait

Kirill Dmitriev, Vladimir Putin's loyalist, has not given up pushing for rapprochement between Russia and the US, starting with a project that should symbolise the newfound cooperation: the tunnel between the coasts of the two countries that should pass under the Bering Strait and be named after the two presidents, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. On Friday, the Russian president's advisor announced, an agreement will be signed to 'continue the design' of the work. But other signs show that the thaw is not such a simple process. "About the tunnel, we will have news tomorrow, we will sign an agreement to continue the design, there will be a tunnel," Dmitriev said speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (Spief). 'This will be one of the most important infrastructures between our countries,' added Dmitriev, who had launched the idea of the tunnel last October. At that time, Putin's advisor had said that the infrastructure could be built by the Boring company, founded by Elon Musk, in eight years at a cost of eight billion dollars.

Dmitriev is Putin's foreign investment advisor and one of the negotiators with Washington. Raised in the US, with studies at Stanford and Harvard and a former Goldman Sachs official, he is the one who, together with US envoy Steve Witkoff, has pushed hardest for a rapprochement between Washington and Moscow after Trump's return to the White House. Also pushing in this direction is the president of the US-Russia Chamber of Commerce, Robert Agee, who, again from the St. Petersburg forum, announced that Russia and the US will play a friendly game of ice hockey on 1 July in Moscow to celebrate the 250th anniversary of US independence. An event, Agee added, that should serve to "melt the wall of ice" between the two countries. The announcement made in recent days by the Russian presidential advisor for foreign policy, Yuri Ushakov, of the presence at the Spief for the first time in several years of an official US delegation led by Rodney Cook, director of the US administration's Fine Arts Commission, also seemed to be a distancing signal. However, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov made it clear that the president, or the Kremlin in general, had no plans for contact with the US representatives. And US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, quoted by Tass, said he knew nothing about the official delegation in St Petersburg. "I am not aware of the delegation that will attend. I know about the event, I know that it will be held, but I don't believe that high-ranking officials will participate,' Rubio said in response to a question at a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee. On the other front, the words of Russian Foreign Minister Serghei Lavrov make it clear that misunderstandings remain between Moscow and Washington over the conflict in Ukraine. The head of Russian diplomacy accused the US of "inconsistent" behaviour, saying that it has not implemented agreements reached during the August 2025 summit in Alaska between Trump and Putin. "A very clear understanding was reached in Alaska based on a specific proposal by the US," Lavrov said in an interview with the Arab television channel RT taken by Tass. "And if the US had really promoted this initiative, I think we would have been at the negotiating table for a long time, and hostilities would have ceased.