“That’s an interesting one,” President Donald Trump said in the Oval Office, his voice half curiosity, half restraint, when presented with one of the most ambitious infrastructure proposals in recent history: a 70-mile undersea tunnel connecting Russia and Alaska across the bottom of the Bering Strait. The proposal, floated by Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a close investment envoy to President Vladimir Putin, envisions a rail and cargo link that Dmitriev insists would “symbolize unity” between the two nations. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, seated beside Trump during the exchange, was blunt: “I’m not happy with it.”
Dmitriev’s concept, posted publicly on social media, went beyond mere symbolism. He proposed that Elon Musk’s Boring Company step up to the engineering feat, saying its tunneling technology could reduce “traditional” cost estimates from more than $65 billion to less than $8 billion, and get the job done in less than eight years. The proposal came shortly after Trump and Putin had a two-hour telephone discussion about ending the war in Ukraine, and agreed to meet again in Budapest. Dmitriev went so far as to label Musk directly, suggesting the “Putin-Trump Tunnel” as a token of goodwill.
Engineering-wise, the scope of the project is enormous. The narrowest part of the Bering Strait, between Cape Dezhnev in Russia and Alaska’s Cape Prince of Wales, is approximately 70 miles across, but the area surrounding it is one of the toughest on the planet. Work crews would have to contend with below-zero temperatures, deep permafrost, and constant seismic activity. It has no fundamental infrastructure: the western coast of Alaska is not connected to the continental U.S. rail system, and Russia’s Chukotka district is thousands of kilometers from its closest rail lines. As Alexander Firanchuk of the Presidential Academy’s International Laboratory for Foreign Trade Research pointed out, “Any ‘saving’ of a couple of days’ travel compared to the sea instantly vanishes against the monstrous costs of building thousands of kilometers of new tracks, bridges, and tunnels in the harshest climates on the planet.”
The mode of construction would be decisive. Engineers may choose a bored tunnel, with a Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) excavating through seabed rock while placing pre-cast segments, or an immersed tube method, where prefabricated units are floated into place, submerged, and made watertight. The latter was adopted in the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macao Link, whose 6.7 km immersed tube section needed precision alignment and sealing under adverse geological conditions. In the Bering Strait, though, deep water, floating ice floes that shift, and powerful currents would introduce layers of complexity missing in warmer projects.
Dmitriev’s cost estimates are based on Musk’s tunnel-building breakthroughs, but The Boring Company’s experience has been with urban projects in hot, arid climates like Las Vegas. Its Nashville high-speed transit loop is in the process of construction, but even that 10-mile tunnel has been protested and scrutinized locally. In Nevada, the company was fined by regulators for an “extraordinary number of violations” such as unauthorized digging and waste spilling. To translate such technology to an Arctic, seismically active marine setting would necessitate unprecedented equipment, material, and safety protocol adaptation.
Beyond engineering, the tunnel’s viability depends on the logistics network it would connect. Dmitry Zavyalov of the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics warned that in the absence of a wider continental rail and cargo network, the tunnel would only useful as part of a larger logistics infrastructure, which would have to be built largely from scratch. With little volume of trade between Russia and the U.S., he urged that the project might be more attractive to China, which would see strategic interest in a transcontinental land link. But geopolitical dangers disputes over ownership, sanctions, and the threat of one country taking over a plant used mainly by another hang in the balance.
The Bering Strait has been the subject of speculative megaprojects for decades, but every attempt has collapsed under the strain of political tension, environmental risks, and prohibitively expensive costs. Trump’s response so far is a combination of intrigue and restraint, Zelenskyy’s is blunt opposition, and that of Musk’s is deafening silence. The engineering challenge is daunting; the geopolitical math, perhaps more so.
