Kirill Dmitriev has tagged Elon Musk with a proposal for The Boring Company to build a tunnel under the Bering Strait, connecting Chukotka to Alaska. He calls it the Putin-Trump tunnel, and his math claims Musk’s technology would cut the cost from $65 billion to $8 billion. That number is fantasy.
The Engineering Reality
A subsea tunnel in Arctic conditions, with permafrost, seismic activity, and no existing rail or road infrastructure on either side, does not become eight times cheaper because someone drills faster. The Boring Company has not completed a single project of this class. Its Las Vegas loop is a small-diameter tunnel under a city.
Nowhere else on Earth pairs such brutal conditions with a project spanning two continents. But the pitch was never about engineering. This political signal masquerades as infrastructure.
The Kremlin Connection
Dmitriev is the same Kremlin-linked figure who has been shopping Russian assets to American investors and pushing sanctions relief as a business opportunity. Now he is offering Musk a direct stake in normalization with Moscow.
That explains the timing of Musk’s attacks on Zelensky and his demand for new elections in Ukraine. He wants to see democracy fail. He is an interested party. Normalizing relations with Russia opens access to projects like this.
It opens Russian markets. It opens the kind of deals that require Washington to stop treating Moscow as a threat.
The Political Pattern
The same logic applies to Trump. The pattern is consistent: pressure Ukraine, demand elections, float sanctions relief, as Russian officials pitch lucrative projects to American businessmen.
The tunnel is the shiny object. The real goal is restoring Russia as a normal business partner while it still occupies Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine does not disappear from this equation because a tunnel is proposed. Every step toward normalization without Russian withdrawal rewards the invasion. Every deal that treats Russia as a reliable counterparty launders the war.
What Is Actually Being Negotiated
The tunnel will remain unbuilt. The geology, the cost, the logistics, and the politics all work against it.
But the offer itself is useful evidence of what is actually being negotiated behind the noise about elections and ceasefires.