A Nightmare on Bering Strait: Arctic politics in October

Spooky season in the Arctic

1. “Military, take over” at the 11th Arctic Circle Assembly

Once a year in October, the Who’s-Who in Arctic politics, research and diplomacy gather for a big conference in Reykjavik - the Arctic Circle Assembly (ACA). The ACA’s panels delve into scads of issues, usually focused on science and regional cooperation. This year’s iteration marked a turning point, however. For the first time, a majority of headlines seeping out of the Icelandic capital revolved not around traditional themes of cooperation, but military concerns. As did, reportedly, most of the chitchat in the hallways.

With Russian participants absent from for a third year in a row, discussions of the war in Ukraine and China-Russia ties were moved to the front burner. The latter is perhaps unsurprising, given recent intrusions of Chinese and Russian fighter jets near Alaska, as well as joint exercises between China’s and Russia’s coast guards in and around the Bering Strait.

Most prominently, a keynote speech by Admiral Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee, highlighted military and naval aspects of Sino-Russian Arctic cooperation. Bauer also spoke of the two countries cooperating on ‘minerals’ and container shipping along the NSR, which reached record levels in 2024. Similar chords were also struck by Iris Ferguson, the U.S.’ Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Arctic and Global Resilience, and the newly minted U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for the Arctic, Mike Sfraga. Elsewhere but simultaneously, General C.Q. Brown, Chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned of ‘military-civilian mixing’ as a tool for great powers to achieve a polar military presence. While debates at the ACA also zoned in on China’s scientific activities in the Arctic, these were generally evaluated on the basis of their ‘dual-use potential.’ On balance, the consensus between conference participants seemed that both Russia and China should be mistrusted and deterred in an Arctic theatre increasingly marked by discord and doom.

Video: Arctic Circle address by Admiral Bauer, 19 October 2024

While valid, concerns over Russia and China in the Arctic have increasingly been probed by parts of the academic community. Many authors, myself included, have pointed out that Chinese involvement in the Russian Arctic has been relatively subdued since 2022. New large-scale investments are few in number, and there are evident contradictions between even some of the basic Arctic policies advanced by both countries. Even commentary in Russian regime outlets has recently been somewhat less optimistic about China’s Arctic ambitions, for instance in this interview with Yana Leksyutina for the Russian Council on Foreign Affairs. Russia remains frustrated by Chinese feet-dragging over energy policy, pipelines, and technology for LNG sites. These days, it occasionally even seems interested in promoting novel Arctic cooperation projects with, well, everyone but Beijing.

Chinese delegates sent to the ACA did not much respond to their country’s Arctic policies being discussed predominantly as a security challenge. Unlike Russia, China was represented at the Assembly at an official level. Liu Zhenmin 刘振民, China’s Special Envoy for Climate Change and the highest-ranking Chinese delegate dispatched to Iceland this year, was the only of the plenary speakers to mention that climate change is still the biggest problem facing the Arctic. This may be viewed as an act of diplomatic masquerade, intended to distract from China’s true and more malign goals in the Arctic and the military motivations behind its cooperation with Russia.

But it is also plausible to assume that China, for which the Arctic is not necessarily a region of primary strategic importance, feels marginalised by its involuntary regional dependence on Moscow. Chinese researchers are now effectively non grata in seven out of eight of the Arctic states. China’s state media often complain about the rough state of Arctic Council cooperation. In a world with no war in Ukraine, China would probably prefer to rekindle cooperation with Arctic states across the board. The fact that, at least during this ACA, the ‘wolf warrior’ diplomats had to take a backseat, might speak to the Chinese belief that such an outcome may - somehow - still be possible to achieve.

2. BRICS - but with ice, please

Arctic perspectives were also discussed - although in demonstratively less gloomy terms - on the sidelines of the BRICS summit Russia hosted in Kazan. The BRICS - a multilateral club originally consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - has become a ‘sandbox’ of sorts for governments to experiment with financial instruments not grounded in the USD. BRICS members typically share concerns about how dollar-based financial instruments have been wielded by the U.S. as an instrument of political coercion. But they do not necessarily agree on other issues in international politics.

For Russia, though, BRICS summits like the one in Kazan serve as a Potemkin village - a shiny facade upon which Moscow can project its all-encompassing vision of a non-Western ‘future global order’. Behind the facade, however, Russia is incapable of bringing about the order it desires. Other BRICS states, bar China, seem lukewarm at best about Moscow’s ideas. Nevertheless, by rubbing shoulders with Modi, Xi, or Lula da Silva, Putin hopes to show the world that he is not an isolated pariah. This show has mostly been indulged by fellow BRICS leaders since 2022 - albeit often at the cost of sharply discounted oil and gas supplies.

Photo: Family photo, BRICS Summit 2024 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The turn towards the BRICS in Russia’s ‘grand strategy’ has also had implications for the Arctic. Russia is wary of depending all-too-strongly on China, both as an energy client and supplier of technologies. With the exclusive Arctic Council club split by the war in Ukraine, and outsiders pushing in through the cracks, Russia has decided to go all-in - and now invites the widest possible range of external countries to partake in its Arctic development projects. Key countries in this effort have included China, India and Brazil, but also Indonesia, the UAE or Turkey. What many of these states have in common is that they are in the business of dealing with Russia within the comparatively presentable confines of the BRICS.

This is why Russia has, over the past three years, attempted to add an Arctic dimension to the work of BRICS. In May 2023, Russia’s former Arctic ambassador, Nikolay Korchunov, hosted a discussion session in Moscow, at which representatives of the five original BRICS countries discussed options for Arctic joint projects. Korchunov suggested for the organisation to establish alternatives to now-paralysed Arctic governance institutions, stating that “in the context of the weakening of the Arctic Council, other formats are becoming important. Any format of cooperation can make a useful contribution to the common cause.” BRICS representatives have also discussed jointly developing the Northern Sea Route, coastal security and shipping, and have expressed an interest in Russia’s Arctic energy projects. Russia has also pushed for BRICS to set up a shared Arctic research station on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

Russia’s Arctic cooperation with China is well-established, and Brazil and South Africa have significant polar research capacities. But the most important of Moscow’s new Arctic BRICS partners is India. I have written about some roadblocks in the way of closer Russo-Indian Arctic cooperation, but generally, New Delhi and Moscow remain keen to work together in the region.

On the sidelines of the Kazan summit, Putin and Modi met up to discuss the Arctic. On 11 October, a new Russo-Indian working group on the Northern Sea Route convened in New Delhi for the first time. Days later, Russia announced its decision to choose Indian over Chinese shipyards for the construction of four new icebreakers, to the value of $750 million. In Vladivostok, Russia’s Far East and Arctic Development Corporation signed a new Memorandum of Understanding with the Indian Chamber of International Business. India also proposed to send sailors to Russia for ice navigation exercises, while Rosatom dispatched officials to visit shipyards in India to evaluate their capacities.

At the same time, India is also being courted as a potential Arctic partner by the West. A well-visited panel ACA Q&A session with Rear Admiral Prasanna, a Joint Secretary in the Government of India, provided the country with a platform to pitch its Arctic ambitions to non-Russian audiences. In turn, the organisers of the ACA announced that its next conference forum will be held in Delhi in April 2025, as a gesture of recognition towards India’s growing polar presence.

3. Last month in Russia’s Arctic policy

On the morning of the 5th of November, Vladimir Putin received news of Donald Trump’s reelection as U.S. President mere minutes before presiding over the launch of Russia’s newest nuclear icebreaker, the Chukotka - which perhaps explains the unusually upbeat tone of the speech the president held to see the ship off.

Video: Vladimir Putin, unusually chipper, on the morning of 5 November

Russia continues to put much funding into the construction of nuclear-powered ice-going ships. In Russia’s draft federal budget, published in October, nearly $1bn of funding was earmarked for the construction of Russia’s future flagship icebreaker. The Rossiya is planned to be twice the size of any other Russian icebreaker. Regardless, Russia remains unlikely to meet its overall goals for the expansion of its icebreaker fleet. Much like in the U.S., the reason for this is a lack of shipbuilding capacities: During a session with Mikhail Mishustin on the 22nd of October, Russia’s deputy Prime Minister, Yuriy Trutnev, admitted that Russian shipyards will only be able to construct 16 out of the needed 70 ice-going vessels by 2030.

On the 28th of October, the spokeswoman for Russia’s diplomatic services, Maria Zakharova, somewhat unconvincingly rebuffed claims in the Financial Times that Russia was “withholding climate data in the Arctic.” The fact that Russia does so is widely accepted among practitioners in the Arctic Council. In another diplomatic development, Vladimir Putin appointed Nikolay Korchunov as Russia’s Ambassador to Norway. As Ambassador for the Arctic, Korchunov was instrumental in frustrating Oslo’s attempts to restore the Arctic Council to minimal levels of functionality. Whether the appointment is supposed to give Korchunov an opportunity to continue this mission, or to install a diplomat known to his Norwegian counterparts in Oslo, remains unclear. Regardless, the appointment underscores the degree to which Russo-Norwegian relations are now structured around Arctic cooperation, or rather the lack thereof.

At the end of October, Russia’s Federation Council Committee on International Affairs departed Moscow for an extraordinary session held in Murmansk. The focus of their discussions lay, reportedly, on “[…] practical issues of compliance with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea” - or, in translation, Russia’s annoyance with the United States’ unilateral demarcation of its continental shelf in the Arctic. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it was working alongside the Russian Senate to develop a ‘mechanism’ to put ‘pressure on countries that violate UNCLOS’. It is unclear how this ‘mechanism’ is supposed to function, or how the Senate would intend to pressure its own boss into ceasing his persistent UNCLOS violations in the Black Sea. The announcement should thus perhaps best be seen as yet another domestic signalling exercise. Following the session in Murmansk, Senator Anatoliy Shirokov briefly appeared on TV to deplore the “loss of partnership-like relations” with western Arctic states.

In an interesting interview with Izvestiya, Vice-Admiral Konstantin Kabantsov shared some interesting details on this year’s Arctic summer voyage of the Northern Fleet. According to the interview, the fleet practised “[…] landing operations, combat training tasks, anti-robot and anti-aircraft defence, including firing of the Kinzhal anti-aircraft missile system, emergency rescue operations, […] operations to protect important maritime economic facilities, and the […] liberation of a port captured by terrorists.”

Meanwhile, Admiral Roman Tolok, the head of Russia’s coastguard, met with his Chinese counterpart in Beijing to announce further joint exercises between the two countries, similar to their recent manoeuvres in the Bering strait. Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Operations also held an “Arctic Security Congress” in Noyabrsk, presumably in preparation for its large international Arctic security exercise coming up in January.

While Russian first responders practised how to respond to challenges both likely and not, including a hypothetical Ukrainian drone attack on an oil station, the Carnegie Endowment’s Maxim Starchak flagged the very real risks associated to the progressive denigration of nuclear security guardrails in Russia’s Arctic territories. In September, Norway had detected heightened levels of radioactive material near its border with Russia. Moscow operates dozens of ageing nuclear submarines in the Arctic, uses the region to test new nuclear-armed weapons, and operates nuclear power plants in the Far North. In the future, nuclear risks in the Russian Arctic are expected to rise further, due to the economic exploitation of the region. Moscow is increasingly incapable and unwilling to clean up even the nuclear pollution that remains in the Arctic from Soviet times. In the past, projects to address this historical pollution were usually funded by other Arctic states, such as Norway. These funds have stopped flowing, however, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Moscow, of course, has been uneager to replace keep such projects going on its own dime.

4. Russia’s Arctic memory politics

On a similarly somber note, the Russian Northern Fleet on the 13th of October held a ceremonial reburial of the remains of Soviet soldiers who died in the Arctic during World War II. The remains, which were dug up during a search exercise earlier this year, were laid to rest at the ‘Dolina slavy’ (‘Valley of Glory’) memorial complex.

Photo: The cemetery of the ‘Dolina slavy’ complex, where the remains of 7000 Soviet soldiers are buried (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

During a brutal battle near the site in the summer of 1941, Soviet forces halted a German assault via Finland and Norway on the port city of Murmansk. This stabilised the USSR’s Arctic frontlines until the autumn of 1944. Vital maritime support convoys from the U.K. and U.S. could make their way to the port. An unknown but enormous number of Soviet soldiers perished in the fighting.

Much like other WWII memorials in Russia, ‘Dolina slavy’ has recently been rebranded. After 2014, Russia’s memory politics were subjected to a hyper-patriotic remodelling campaign, which did not spare Arctic memorial sites. Previously called the ‘Dolina smerti’ (Valley of Death), the complex used to be a place of quiet commemoration. In more recent times, it has become a site for Victory Day gatherings and other events laden with symbolism. These are intended to associate Soviet deeds of WWII to the ongoing war against Ukraine in the minds of Russian citizens.

Photo: A memorial plaque at the ‘Dolina slavy’ (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, a mobile exhibition displaying ‘captured NATO technologies’ from the battlefields in Ukraine welcomed 32,000 visitors during a five-day stop on the Yamal peninsula, serving perhaps as an illustration of the extraordinary militarisation Russian society has experienced under the rule of Vladimir Putin.

5. An update on Arctic sanctions

The United States continues its efforts to shut down Russia’s Arctic LNG industries. In a new round of sanctions, the U.S. in October took aim at logistics companies that provide services to Novatek’s Arctic LNG 2 project. Among newly sanctioned entities were four Dubai-based LNG vessel operators and one Emirati shipping company, as was reported by Malte Humpert. The Abu Dhabi-based construction company Smart Solutions Ltd. was also sanctioned. This more than doubles the number of companies from the Emirates that have come into the crosshairs of the U.S. Treasury for supporting Russia’s Arctic development plans.

On October 11, American sanctions caused a temporary shutdown of Arctic LNG 2 for the second time this year. Carriers loaded with LNG from the site remain stranded near it, as potential buyers globally are increasingly deterred from buying up Russian-produced liquefied gas. Arctic LNG 2 moreover now faces a vessel shortage, as a Russian yards delayed deliveries of badly needed ships and a Japanese operator stepped away from the project.

U.S. sanctions have successfully thrown sand into the engines of Russia’s Arctic energy industries, but it appears that their effectiveness has limits. Despite the many attempts to deter the delivery of technologies to Russia’s Arctic from China, the first sections of a Chinese-made power plant for Arctic LNG arrived in Belokamenka in early November. Experts interpreted the delivery as a “significant blow to U.S. efforts to stop the expansion of Russian LNG production capacity.”

Russia’s Arctic energy projects are also kept alive thanks to the European Union, which in 2024 again imported record-breaking quantities of LNG from Russia - in spite of its prior pledges to wean itself off Russian gas supplies. To add insult to injury, the NGO Disclose recently uncovered that LNG vessels operating as part of Russia’s gas shadow fleet have been making discreet repair stops at a shipyard operated by a Dutch company in the French port of Brest.

6. Space jam(ming)

Finally, the linkages between outer space and the Arctic continue to multiply. If you would like to read more on that topic, here’s a link to a primer I published on 66° North.

On the 17th of October, NATO announced a new multilateral cooperation initiative to advance its ‘deterrence and defence’ against Russia. A bloc of thirteen NATO states agreed to implement the NORTHLINK initiative, which will establish space-based communication systems across the Arctic using commercial satellites. These should normally be put into space by Elon Musk’s Starlink. NATO militaries want to insulate themselves against Russian jamming attacks in the Far North, and improve their reconnaissance abilities in Arctic territories. The NORTHLINK initiative intersects with the recent U.S. Department of Defense strategy for Arctic space capabilities - and, it is hoped, will help the alliance in reaching its ambitious goals in expanding Arctic satellite coverage.

A number of broadband satellites that were launched by the Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission (ASBM) in August have recently completed tests. They are confirmed as being operational, and will be owned and controlled by Norway’s state space agency, Space Norway. The satellites will provide broadband coverage to civilian and military users, including in the U.S., from next year onwards.

The connections between space in the Arctic were also discussed at the Arctic Council Assembly. Tim Reilly, a researcher at the Scott Polar Research Institute of the University of Cambridge, wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Sino-Russian collaboration on Arctic space infrastructures. The High North News published an interview with Tim in October, which is well worth reading.

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