During a day-long visit to Sitka Wednesday, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski addressed topics of local, state and national significance, mostly as they related to policies put in place by Donald Trump in the first weeks of his second term as president.

Topics covered by Alaska's senior member of the U.S. Senate were Trump's indiscriminate firing of probationary federal workers, punitive tariffs on international trade and the reversal of American support for Ukraine.

Murkowski met first with an invited list of local officials and civic leaders at an invitation-only roundtable, and then at an interview with the Sentinel and KCAW Raven Radio.

Sitkans and many other Alaskans are voicing a great deal of displeasure over cuts to the federal civil service by the new Trump administration, Murkowski said at the press conference. A story on the roundtable discussion, which focused heavily on cuts to federal positions, ran in Thursday’s Sentinel.

At the press conference she once again alluded to the "frustration and anxiety" being created in Alaska "by this uncertainty that we're seeing with some of these decisions coming out of DOGE" (Department of Government Efficiency, spearheaded by billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk).

Turning to other issues, she said that with Trump's tariffs "causing turbulence across global markets," she is concerned about the possibility of a recession.

High inflation was a "really big factor" in the way people voted in November. "I think they wanted to see prices drop, and we're not seeing that happen now," she said. "In fact, what we're hearing is that, well, with tariffs, it might actually further the pain that families are feeling with what they're paying. And so when we ask about things like recession and could we be headed towards one, I think, if I were those in the administration, I'd be watching this very, very carefully.”

As for Trump's trade policy, she said his push to levy tariffs on items from Canadian timber to energy exports are likely to further increase the cost of living in Alaska.

"We've seen the pushback from Canada, and I think we will begin to see some of that impact in terms of higher cost... We get much of our wood products out of Canada," Murkowski said. She said there's now a "chilling effect" on the "very cooperative, collaborative relationship with our Canadian neighbors." The effect on tourism to Alaska through Canada "remains to be seen," she added.

Murkowski reported on what she learned from her meeting with members of the Alaska Forestry Association Tuesday, and their concerns about Chinese counter-tariffs on American timber.

The market for U.S. timber "has been, and probably will continue to be in China, and now China has effectively put a ban on the logs coming out of the United States, coming out of Alaska,” she said.

Ukraine

Murkowski also spoke of her differences with the Trump administration''s policy on Ukraine.

"We want to see peace in Ukraine. We want to see the war end, but it cannot end on Russia's terms,” Murkowski told the Sentinel. “Russia invaded Ukraine; they started this war. And there is responsibility for the actions that we have seen, the bloodshed, the loss, the destruction. I have been a supporter of Ukraine from the beginning; when a democratic country gets invaded by another country, we don't just avert our eyes and say, you know, ‘we wish them well.’”

She cited the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, a document signed three years after the fall of the Soviet Union in which the U.S., U.K. and Russian Federation agreed to defend Ukrainian sovereignty on the condition that Kyiv relinquish its nuclear weapons, which it did.

“We said, if you stand down from nuclear capability, you're going to have a partner in the United States, we will help you with your defense,” the senator said. “And so that is again, a multi-decade commitment. And so you overlay that on top of, again, the fact that Putin invaded a democratic country. Ukraine never asked us to put boots on the ground; they asked for our support. They asked for our support, and we were there.”

In the past decade, she noted, Republicans have been defenders of Ukraine against Russian aggression, and she was critical of what she perceived as the Obama administration’s slow response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine's Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014.

Murkowski said she was shocked by Trump's pivot away from Ukraine as indicated by his recent meeting with the Ukrainian president at a press event in the White House.

“We saw the exchange in the Oval Office with President Zelenskyy, and then literally within hours after that, learned that, whether it was military intelligence or ammunition to Ukraine, that the aid was to be stopped. In my view, that was just head spinning in terms of the message, not only that was being sent to Zelenskyy and to the people of Ukraine," Murkowski said. "… We have gone from a position of supporting Ukraine to now one of whether it's placating Russia or just making nice with Putin, as I suggested in my legislative speech.”

Trump’s actions, she added, have cast doubt on the validity of America’s post-World War II alliances.

“The message then that is sent... is inconsistent with what we have not only said about our support for Ukraine, but how we support other democracies around the world and to have our friends and our allies in Europe wondering whether or not the United States can be relied on as a friend and an ally after this.”

Any peace deal, she said, “must be on terms that Ukraine helps to set.”