The Bering Strait (the body of water separating Russia from Alaska) is only 55 miles across, so it seems like Russians were better poised to discover the Americas than Spain or the Vikings were. Is it just that no one ever thought to venture deep into the northern Pacific Ocean, or did people discover Alaska/Canada early on but colonization wasn’t worth the effort?
This was asked recently, in https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e9oo9b/how_did_russia_not_discover_the_new_world_sooner/
Basically, Russia was much more than 55 miles from Alaska at the time. Until about a hundred years after Columbus had reached the New World, Russia was still west of the Urals. It was at that time - in the late 1500s - that the Russian expansion to the east, into Siberia, began. Russia reached the Pacific and the Bering Strait in the mid-1600s, long after the Americas had been discovered.
So, in 1492, Russians would have had to travel not just 55 miles, but about 5,000km overland and then another 55 miles by sea, to reach Alaska. This isn't as far as the distance from Spain to the Caribbean (which is about 7,000km), but is much further than the distance from Iceland to the Americas (about 2,500km). Add to that the advantages of sea travel for covering long distances (at least if the winds are favourable), and it's easy to see why the east coast of the Americas was the first discovered by Europeans.