Of the millions of Ukrainians driven from their homes by Russia's invasion, 1,000 have ended up in, of all places, Alaska. They found work in fisheries and bakeries, learned to drive the snowbound winter roads and cobbled together new lives near the top of the world.

Now, they are watching with a mixture of hope and unease as the man who led the attack on their homeland, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, arrives in the state where they found refuge, to meet President Donald Trump on Friday at a military base in Anchorage.

"It's difficult to accept that he's going to be here," Liudmyla Stretovych, who left Ukraine two weeks after Russia invaded in February 2022, said of Putin. "We lived through a lot of pain because of him."

But Alaska's recent Ukrainian arrivals said Putin's looming visit had jolted them on a deeper level, bringing a war that is never far from their minds right into their backyards. "It's difficult to accept that he's going to be here," Liudmyla Stretovych, who fled Ukraine, said of Putin.

Stretovych, 42, and her two kids spent the first days of the war in 2022 huddled in the basement of their Kyiv building before deciding to flee. They came to the US under a Biden-era programme.

New York Times News Service