The surge of political attention to the Arctic may appear counter-intuitive to the experts overtaxed with assessing the consequences of the global trade war, perplexed by the deadlock of the Ukraine War, and frustrated by the deepening indifference to the Gaza war.
Nuclear icebreaker in the Arctic. Photo: Sepp Friedhuber / Getty Images
No notable power shifts are indeed registered in the High North, but it happens to be the region where President Donald Trump’s ambitions for grandeur meet President Vladimir Putin’s aspirations to assert Russia’s position of power – and exacerbate European worries about US disengagement from the collective security arrangements.
Neither of these drivers can stand a Realpolitik test of strict examination of national interests. But, in real policy-making, emotions and delusions often matter more than rigorous calculations of costs and benefits.
Climate change
One often invoked reason for rising geopolitical competition is climate change, and the Arctic ice is indeed retreating, albeit not as fast as typically perceived. The summer minimum was registered in 2012, and it is theoretically possible that the mark of 3.39 million square kilometres may be altered this year, since the winter maximum is the lowest on the record.
Russian scientists have, nevertheless, recently reported to Putin that navigation in the Northern Seas will not be any easier by 2050, so the fleet of icebreakers needs to be modernized. The delays and cost-overruns with the construction in the Vladivostok shipyard of a new nuclear Leader-class icebreaker are, therefore, more than a little unfortunate.
An even greater problem for Russia is the melting permafrost, which causes deformations in the energy infrastructure in Siberia. International scientific cooperation on this phenomenon has been badly affected by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, so the data on the volumes of methane released into the atmosphere is rather approximate.
China’s activities in the Arctic
Another typical stimulus for Western attention is the alleged expansion of China’s activities in the Arctic. For several years after the publication of the White Paper in January 2018, which asserted the unique status of a “Near Arctic State,” these activities were indeed on the rise.
In recent years, however, this trend has been reversed so that research projects on the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago are still discussed, while the sale of land is blocked by the government in Oslo.
Beijing had explored opportunities for investing in Greenland, but has abandoned the plans after encountering local concerns and disapproval from Copenhagen. Moscow remains reluctant to expand the scope of cooperation with China in the Arctic, even if the need for investments is acute. China is careful to present its Arctic activities as strictly mercantilist, and its interest in using the Northern Sea Route (NSR) as a transit route to the European markets is still declared rather than acted upon.
Northern Sea Route (Sevmorput)
The expansion of this route (called Sevmorput in Russian) is one of Putin’s big ambitions for the Arctic, but his insistence on maintaining full control over the navigation is a major impediment for international investors. Investments in the port infrastructure are far below needs, so most of the maritime traffic on the Sevmorput is the LNG export from the Yamal Sabetta terminal.
Russian obsession with sovereignty over the Arctic underpins its claim for expanding its continental shelf by some 2.1 million square kilometres between the Lomonosov and Mendeleev undersea ridges and beyond the North Pole. The UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf has registered this claim. Still, it cannot issue a final recommendation because of the overlap with the claims submitted by Canada and Denmark.
Militarization of the Arctic
Instead of investing in the development of infrastructure, Moscow channeled funding into the construction of a chain of military bases along the Sevmorput. This course on accelerated militarization of the Arctic was a major concern for the neighbours and a worry for China, which insists on the peaceful development of the “global common” in the High North.
Typically, this Russian military build-up is presented as a key justification for the increase of Western efforts aimed at countering this threat, but in fact, since the start of the Ukraine War, Moscow was compelled to downsize its Arctic garrisons.
The Northern Fleet has effectively lost capacity for amphibious operations as three of its landing ships were deployed to the Black Sea and suffered hits from Ukrainian missiles and naval drones. Both the 61st Naval Infantry “Kirkenes” Brigade and the 80th Motorized Infantry Arctic Brigade are engaged in combat operations and have suffered heavy losses. Finland plans for deploying more units along its 1.340 kilometres long border with Russia, but on the other side of this new Russian interface with NATO, hardly any troops are present.
The only element of Russian military might in the High North that is full strength and even gaining more capabilities is the squadrons of nuclear submarines, both strategic and multipurpose.
Attending the Arctic forum in Murmansk last March, Putin supervised the ceremony of launching the Perm nuclear submarine and made time for a visit to the Arkhangelsk submarine of the same Yasen-class.
This threat needs to be monitored rigorously by the Northern European states, particularly as Russian sonars planted for tracking the UK nuclear submarines are discovered and duly eliminated. What makes this task feasible for the Nordics, who expand the pattern of joint exercises, like the Joint Viking in Northern Norway last March, is the inability of the Russian Northern Fleet to establish a maritime “Bastion” in the Barents Sea because of the lack of major surface combatants and the redeployment of most surface-to-air missile systems closer to the war zone.
Risks generated by Russia’s attempts to exploit its presumed superiority in the Arctic are serious and range from a possible catastrophic accident with a nuclear submarine, similar to the explosion that sunk the Kursk in August 2000, to a probable resumption of nuclear testing at the Novaya Zemlya test site. Instead of examining these risks, Russian pundits keep speculating about the allegedly looming threats from NATO.
Even in the better researched analyses, the need to protect Russia’s control over the grossly exaggerated natural resources in the Arctic is presumed to be self-evident, while Western desire to gain access to these riches is depicted as the major driver of the escalating geopolitical scramble.
The new US discourse on the Arctic
These distorted assumptions are, in a peculiar way, reflected in the new US discourse on the Arctic, in which the goal of gaining control over Greenland is advanced as an absolute imperative.
National security is invoked as the main rationale for this goal-setting, while the real value of its deposits of rare-earth elements is unknown, and the costs of mining these minerals cannot be estimated even provisionally. The price tag is apparently not an issue in Trump’s far-fetched proposition for building an armada of 40 icebreakers. Characteristically, he is not offering to purchase Greenland but relies on crude pressure, so Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen cannot counter it with polite dissuasion and has to take a firm stance.
Ensuring Arctic security is a complex task demanding the sustained efforts of many stakeholders, from experts in anti-submarine warfare to environmental activists. This collective work clashes with political agendas shaped by personal ambitions, delusional threat perceptions, and fanciful geopolitics.
- Pavel K Baev is a Research Professor at PRIO
- This text was first published by Global Panorama 14 April 2025