Russian President Vladimir Putin’s final words at the Alaska summit were delivered with a smile, spoken in an uncharacteristic burst of English.

Putin has such an arrangement with Belarus and might be satisfied with a Ukraine that’s not fully sovereign, militarily weak and outside of NATO. At the Alaska summit, Putin not only mentioned Ukraine as a “brotherly nation,” but also emphasized that “the situation in Ukraine has to do with fundamental threats to Russian security.”

“The symbolism of Alaska would be a reminder of how it was possible for the United States and Russia for most of the 19th century to transcend their ideological and political differences and their expansionisms, to have warm, friendly cooperative relations,” says David S. Foglesong, a history professor at Rutgers University - New Brunswick.