Wrangel Island

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Wrangel Island is the easternmost of the archipelago of large islands in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Siberia. The island straddles the 180th meridian of longitude, is probably the last place where woolly mammoths lived, and has had an odd history of competing sovereignty claims between the United States, Canada, and the former Soviet Union. You can read more about it here:
Wrangel Island

When the last Wrangel mammoth died some time between 2500 and 2000 BC, the Great Pyramids of Giza had already been built and the last Ice Age had been over for thousands of years. Though they never faced human hunting during their millennia on the island, food was always scarce, and the Wrangel mammoths were pygmies compared with the great mammoths of Siberia and the Pacific coast of North America, and they eventually died out without human intervention. The first people to set foot on Wrangel Island landed there shortly after the mammoths disappeared, but a lack of evidence of hunting indicates that human lives never crossed paths with the mammoths while they were alive. The island is a rough place to make a living and even to travel to, and it wasn't until 1881 that the first modern explorers, an American expedition led by Calvin L. Hooper, landed there and claimed sovereignty. Nuclear icebreakers make things much easier today.

Despite Hooper's claim, the United States did little to back up its ownership of the island, and the then-new Soviet government evicted the dozen or so settlers to Vladivostok, then Seattle aboard the vessel Red October in 1924. Russia still claims Wrangel today, but has mostly left it alone as a nature preserve. Wrangel Island is now one of the largest breeding grounds in the world for polar bears since they can reliably make homes there without human interference regardless of ice conditions in the Arctic. The Soviet Union's environmental record can best be described as "troubling," so it's nice to see some of the outback Russia inherited has managed to stay pristine over the years.