The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy escorts the Russian tanker Renda 250 miles south of Nome, Alaska in the Bering Sea. The vessels are transiting through ice up to five feet thick as the tanker Renda carries 1.3 million gallons of fuel to Nome. (UPI/Sara Francis/U.S. Coast Guard) | License Photo

A petition seeking the secession of Alaska back to Russia received more than 10,000 signatures in three days and is well on its way to getting enough signers to require an official response from the White House.

The "Alaska Back to Russia" petition was created by an unnamed Anchorage resident (S.V.) last week and it has already gotten more than 18,000 signatures. The petition needs 100,000 signers by April 20 to warrant a response from the Obama administration.


According to the petition:

“Groups Siberian russians crossed the Isthmus (now the Bering Strait) 16-10 thousand years ago. Russian began to settle on the Arctic coast, Aleuts inhabited the Aleutian Archipelago. First visited Alaska August 21, 1732, members of the team boat St. Gabriel »under the surveyor Gvozdev and assistant navigator I. Fedorov during the expedition Shestakov and DI Pavlutski 1729-1735 years…Vote for secession of Alaska from the United States and joining Russia.”

A similar petition seeking the secession of Texas garnered the following response from the White House after collecting more than 100,000 signatures.

"Our founding fathers established the Constitution of the United States 'in order to form a more perfect union' through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. They enshrined in that document the right to change our national government through the power of the ballot -- a right that generations of Americans have fought to secure for all. But they did not provide a right to walk away from it."

The United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million.

[KTUU] [Alaska back to Russia]