Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, publicly proposed that Elon Musk build an underground tunnel beneath the Bering Strait linking Russia’s Chukotka region with Alaska in the United States. In Dmitriev’s vision, the project would be named “Putin-Trump” and would become, as he put it, a symbol of unity between Russia and the US.
“Imagine a tunnel connecting the US and Russia, America and Afro-Eurasia - the ‘Putin-Trump’ tunnel, a 70-mile link symbolizing unity. The time has come for humanity to connect continents for the first time in history,” Dmitriev wrote on X.
He estimated the project’s cost at $65 billion. At the same time, he argued that with the technology of The Boring Company, founded by Musk in 2016, the tunnel could be built for less than $8 billion. Dmitriev also said the RDIF was prepared to help finance the project and that construction could be completed in under eight years.
He added that the idea of linking Russia and the United States across the Bering Strait has existed for a long time. Among the options the fund has studied, he said, is a broader rail route connecting the US, Canada, Russia, and China. Neither Vladimir Putin nor Donald Trump has commented publicly on the proposal so far.
The initiative came shortly after Soviet archival materials on the assassination of John F. Kennedy were handed over in the United States. On October 15, 2025, Dmitriev took part in transferring those documents to Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna. According to her, Congress had unsuccessfully sought about 350 pages of secret KGB material back in the 1990s, and access has now been granted for the first time.
Dmitriev claims the files include references to an older proposal for a tunnel under the Bering Strait associated with the names of John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. In the collection published by Luna, titled “The Assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet-American Relations,” issued in Moscow in 2025 under the editorship of SVR director Sergei Naryshkin, there is indeed a handwritten sketch of a crossing between the USSR and Alaska. The note on the drawing says that a bridge of peace can and should be built immediately between Alaska and Russia.