Vice President JD Vance will land in Greenland on Friday to a choir of anger and anxiety in the White House plans to seize the Arctic territory by any necessary means.
Vance travels with the second lady Usha Vance, energy secretary Chris Wright and national security advisor Michael Waltz.
Hours before they started from the joint base of Andrews in Maryland, Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Thursday night that he had no problem with the accelerated terrestrial proposed by the president of the United States, the land of the largest island in the world.
Trump’s desire to take Greenland has “long historical roots,” Putin said Thursday in the Arctic Forum in Russia in Murmansk, the largest city north of the Arctic Circle. “This is a problem that concerns two specific nations and has nothing to do with us.”
In Greenland, a semi -autonomous territory owned by Denmark, it is likely that Vance will obtain a cold reception.
His boss, President Trump, has declared his desire to take care of the territory for years, two thirds of which they sit on the Arctic Circle, and whose melted ice hides a bonanza of elements of rare earth, oil and natural gas.
During his second term, Trump has intensified those statements, saying on Wednesday that the United States “will go as far as we have to go”, alarming Denmark and other American allies, who have not been sure how to respond to this hostile overture.
Denmark completely controlled the island for 300 years until it became a semi -autonomous territory in 1953. Although Greenland won a rule of origin in 1979, Copenhagen still controls its foreign and defense policy and contributes a little less than $ 1 billion to its economy.
It is a vast and scarce land, around the size of Alaska and California combined but with only 56,000 people.
NBC News traveled there this week before Vance’s visit and the locals said they felt betrayed by their giant neighbor of North America.
“We have always looked at the United States as the good older brother to help you and now it’s like the older brother accumulates you,” said Anders Laursen, 41, owner of a local aquatic taxis company.
That anger saw the visit of the US delegation largely with a scale, although with the addition of the vice president. Originally, I intended to cover a visit to the Nuuk capital and with cultural elements such as a breed in the cradle of dogs, now it will only last one day and will limit itself to the EE. UU.
A person who does not raise objections is Putin.
He used his speech in Murmansk to detail beyond the attempts of the United States to annex Greenland to the 1860s. The Russian leader has often used his own reading of Ukrainian history, which experts say that he is full of ahistoric imprecision, to justify his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Yale’s history professor Timothy Snyder said that both Trump’s Groenland and Ukraine Gambits were similar to “United States that allowed Russian imperialism.”
He wrote in X that Washington’s approach was “destroying his own alliances, cutting off his own crucial bases, facilitating a first Russian nuclear attack in the United States” and “opening Arctic territories that were once safe for Russian expansion.”
On the eve of the visit, the political parties of Greenland prohibited forming a coalition government after the elections there last month, according to local media reports.
Jens-Frederik Nielsen, leader of Demokraatit, the largest party of the legislature, had urged his rivals to put aside his domestic differences and form the widest possible coalition to resist the perspective of a hostile shot of Trump.
That seems to have happened, with four of the five games in the legislature involved in the new coalition, local media reported.
During the elections of Greenland, the eventual winner, Nielsen, told NBC News International Sky News that “we do not want to be Americans. No, we don’t want to be Danish. We want to be Greenlanders.”
Mithil Aggarwal contributed.
