Thanks, Brown Deer. Very interesting. Although if those earlier posts are true, it looks as if the effort to give away the islands started under George H. W. Bush.
Still, unless the revised treaty proposed back then by Bush has been ratified, it’s still Obama who appears to be doing the giveaway, without due ratification by the Senate. A treaty is not a treaty until it is ratified.
Is that right?
Although if those earlier posts are true, it looks as if the effort to give away the islands started under George H. W. Bush.
Not hardly.
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Even though Russia had long before be putting equipment and people on these islands?
http://heritage-expeditions.com/destination/wrangel-island/
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Russian settlement began in 1926, followed by military installations at Zvezdnyi on Somnitel’naya Bay, and reindeer herder settlements, later abandoned, but with many artefacts still well preserved
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1023
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In 1911 the famous icebreakers, Tamyr and Vaygach, as part of the Russian Arctic Ocean Hydrographic Expedition (1910-15) briefly landed a party on Wrangel Island and claimed it for Russia. In 1914, survivors from the Vilhjalmur Stefansson-led Canadian Arctic Expedition’ s doomed Northern Party camped on Wrangel Island for nine harrowing months. Their ever-controversial leader had abandoned them in September 1913, leaving them for dead aboard their ship, the CGS Karluk, stuck fast in the ice pack.
Not content with that fiasco, Stefansson landed an “occupation” party of five on Wrangel Island in 1921, apparently to assist Canada and Britain in the so-called “northward course of empire”. In another epic arctic drama, his experiment ended in tragedy, leaving a brave young Inuit woman, Ada Blackjack, the sole survivor. In spite of this abject failure, another group of Inuit were installed in 1923, but these hapless souls were eventually evicted in 1926 by Russia, setting off yet another dispute that would simmer for years after.
http://monolith.com.au/wrangel/