As Vance heads for Greenland, Trump’s land-grab hopes get Putin thumbs-up

Vice President JD Vance is set to touch down in Greenland on Friday to a chorus of anger and anxiety at White House plans to seize the Arctic territory by any means necessary.

Vance is traveling with the second lady Usha Vance, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and national security adviser Michael Waltz.

Hours before they set off from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday night that he had no problem with U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed land-grab of the world’s largest island.

Trump’s desire to take Greenland has “long historical roots,” Putin said Thursday at Russia’s Arctic Forum in Murmansk, the largest city north of the Arctic circle. “This is an issue that concerns two specific nations and has nothing to do with us.”

In Greenland itself, a semi-autonomous territory owned by Denmark, Vance is likely to get a chilly reception.

His boss, President Trump, has for years stated his desire to take over the territory, two-thirds of which sit above the Arctic Circle, and whose melting ice hides a bonanza of rare earth elements, oil and natural gas.

During his second term, Trump has escalated those statements, saying Wednesday that the United States will “go as far as we have to go” — alarming Denmark and other American allies, who have been unsure how to respond to this hostile overture.

Denmark fully controlled the island for 300 years until it became a semi-autonomous territory in 1953. Although Greenland gained home rule in 1979, Copenhagen still controls its foreign and defense policy and contributes just under $1 billion to its economy.

It is a vast, sparse land — around the size of Alaska and California combined but with only 56,000 people.

NBC News traveled there this week ahead of Vance’s visit and locals said they felt betrayed by their giant North American neighbor.

“We have always looked at America like the nice big brother to help you out and now it’s like the big brother in bullying you,” said Anders Laursen, 41, the owner of a local water taxi company.

That anger saw the U.S. delegation’s visit vastly downscaled albeit with the addition of the vice president. Originally intended to encompass a visit to the capital Nuuk and with cultural elements such as a dog-sled race, it will now only last one day and be confined to U.S. Pituffik Space Base, which is hundreds of miles from the capital — and likely any dissenting locals.

One person not raising objections is Putin.

He used his speech in Murmansk to detail past U.S. attempts to annex Greenland dating to the 1860s. The Russian leader has often used his own reading of Ukrainian history — which experts say is replete with ahistorical inaccuracies — to justify his invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022.

The Yale history professor Timothy Snyder said that both Trump’s Greenland and Ukraine gambits were akin to “America enabling Russian imperialism.”

He wrote on X that Washington’s approach was “destroying its own best alliances, cutting itself off from its own crucial bases, making a Russian nuclear first strike on the US easier” and “opening Arctic territories that were once safe to Russian expansion.”

On the eve of the visit, Greenland’s political parties banned together to form a coalition government following elections there last month, according to local media reports.

Jens-Frederik Nielsen, leader of Demokraatit, the largest party in the legislature, had urged his rivals to put aside their domestic differences and form the broadest possible coalition to resist the prospect of a hostile Trump takeover.

That appears to have come to pass, with four of the five parties in the legislature involved in the new coalition, local media reported.

During the Greenlandic election, the eventual winner, Nielsen told NBC News international partner Sky News that “we don’t want to be Americans. No, we don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders.”