How to respond to China-Russia cooperation in the Arctic

A book chapter for the Institute for Security and Development Policy (ISDP)

The Institute for Security and Development Policy (ISDP) is a non-profit, non-partisan research and policy organisation from Stockholm. They recently invited me to contribute to a book project on China-Russia relations in the Arctic, which gave me an opportunity to update my earlier thoughts on that topic. The book has just come out, you can download it here for free. Below, you can read my own contribution:

Image: Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping toasting in front of an Arctic landscape (Source: OpenAI)

It has become common for analysts in the West to refer to relations between Russia and China in the Arctic as a ‘partnership’, and with good reason: for one thing, the Russian and Chinese governments themselves use this term. Ever since Russia’s last-minute acceptance of China’s application to become an observer state at the Arctic Council in 2013, Moscow and Beijing have pledged to expand their cooperation on Arctic affairs. Starting in 2018, Russia and China institutionalised their Arctic cooperation dialogues in the form of a regular bilateral consultations mechanism. In September 2021, the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Russia and China announced that they would pursue Arctic cooperation in the ‘spirit of a comprehensive strategic partnership’. In February 2022, Beijing and Moscow labelled their overall relationship a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership without limits’ - and promised to further improve their cooperation in the Arctic. Many similar declarations followed.

At first glance, China’s and Russia’s interests in the region do indeed appear to be complementary. Most importantly, Moscow plans to expand the extraction of oil and gas in the Russian Arctic. China, in turn, sees Russia as a reliable supplier of hydrocarbons, and has consistently expanded its imports of these products from Russia. China aims to meet its decarbonisation targets by replacing much of the coal it consumes with Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), which it deems a ‘bridge’ to cleaner renewable energies. A majority of Russia’s current and planned Arctic extraction projects produce LNG. All of these projects target the Chinese market, and they have long offered attractive investment deals to Chinese banks and partner companies.

Russia also wants to turn the Northern Sea Route (NSR) into a year-round shipping corridor. It hopes to benefit from passage fees and to position itself as a key node in global maritime logistics. China supports this ambition. A successful year-round operationalisation of container shipping along the NSR would allow Chinese shipping firms to cut delivery times on the benchmark Shanghai-Rotterdam route by more than a quarter. The route could also enable the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy to circumvene U.S.-controlled maritime chokepoints, such as the Malacca strait and Suez canal, in case of an armed conflict. In a series of official documents including the 14th Five-Year Plan, the Chinese government even floated the idea of financing a ‘Polar Silk Road’ - an offshoot of the Belt and Road Initiative along Russia’s northern coastlines. Sino-Russian maritime cooperation also has a military component: The navies of China and Russia have recently held joint exercises in Arctic and adjacent waters - including in the Bering strait and close to U.S. territorial seas.

Lastly, China has also backed Russia in some disputes over the future of the Arctic governance system. Russia maintains that the suspension of regional cooperation by the ‘Arctic Seven’ in the wake of its assault on Ukraine was unjustified. China has publicly declared that it would not recognise the Arctic Council without Russia. In official statements, Beijing and Moscow have both called for ‘disagreements’ over the war in Ukraine to be bracketed out of cooperation dialogues in the Arctic.

Taken in sum, this overlap of interests should indeed have laid a solid groundwork for a Sino-Russian Arctic ‘partnership’. In practice, however, China and Russia have often struggled to convert their Arctic announcements into action, with many attempts altogether stalled. A discrepancy has thus emerged between the promises of Arctic coordination contained in both countries’ public statements, and the reality of Sino-Russian Arctic cooperation on the ground. All debates on whether to classify Sino-Russian Arctic cooperation as a ‘partnership’, as well as how to respond to it, must take this discrepancy into account. While Russia and China proclaim to have established a ‘partnership’ in the Arctic, a more detailed examination makes it clear that their cooperation in the region is bounded.

Image: Yamal LNG (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

For one thing, China’s appetite for Russia’s Arctic hydrocarbons is large, but not unlimited. After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Sino-Russian energy cooperation in the Arctic initially expanded fast. In January 2014, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) acquired a 20% stake in Novatek’s Yamal LNG project, which matched a share held by France’s TotalEnergies since 2011. The Silk Road Fund became the consortium’s fourth-largest partner in 2015, securing a 9.9% stake. The Yamal LNG project developed the Yuzhno-Tambeyskoye natural gas field on the Yamal Peninsula, with production of natural gas and gas condensate commencing in 2017. In May 2014, Gazprom and CNPC concluded a US$400 billion contract for gas supplies via the Power of Siberia 1 pipeline. The rapid conclusion of this agreement following protracted negotiations was widely interpreted as a reflection of China’s implicit support for Russia in the wake of the 2014 war in Ukraine. Shortly thereafter, the China Import-Export Bank and China Development Bank extended an emergency loan to Novatek to alleviate the effects of Western financial sanctions on the Yamal LNG project. This turned China into the largest foreign stakeholder in Russian Arctic energy projects.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the exit of Western companies from the region, however, no similar buy-up of abandoned Russian Arctic energy assets by Chinese companies occurred. Chinese funding did enable Novatek to continue operations at Yamal LNG, while also keeping the financing of its Arctic LNG 2 site on track. But plans for future LNG sites in the Russian Arctic, such as Obskiy LNG and Murmansk LNG, failed to attract new Chinese investment, and had to be postponed indefinitely.

The Chinese government has also been dragging its feet over negotiations regarding the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, which Russia hopes might soon link its Yamal peninsula to China via Siberia and Mongolia. Given several significant delays, it is currently unclear whether the pipeline will ever be built. In August 2024, Mongolia decided to omit any mentions of the pipeline from a new national energy action plan. In April 2025, China then publicly considered whether to support a more recently proposed alternative pipeline through Kazakhstan. The reasons for the delay of Power of Siberia 2 are partly commercial: China already buys much natural gas from Russia, and considers itself to be in a position to demand domestic gas pricing from Moscow. This would, however, render the pipeline financially unsustainable from the Russian point of view. But Beijing also pursues an energy security strategy that heavily prioritises diversifying the range of its oil and gas suppliers. China wants to avoid entering into any over-reliance, including on Russia, on national security grounds.

China has also shown much sensitivity to Western-imposed sanctions on Russian technology purchases. In 2023 and 2024, Chinese suppliers were approached to substitute critical technologies required by Russia’s Arctic LNG sites. Western sanctions curtail the export of deep water and Arctic offshore oil extraction technologies, LNG liquefaction technologies and modules, and ice-class shipping and infrastructure components. The highest-quality versions of those technologies are still produced by European and U.S. companies, as well as firms in South Korea and Japan - all countries that have placed sanctions on Russia. The exit of these companies from the country following the imposition of the sanctions created supply bottlenecks for Moscow, especially at the Arctic LNG 2 construction site. And while Chinese companies were asked by Russian partners to fill the resulting technology gaps, these overtures were not always successful.

As an illustrative example, Novatek's Arctic LNG 2 site relies on the assembly of large, prefabricated gravity-based LNG modules abroad, and their subsequent shipment to Russia. The state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and China’s Wison New Energies took over the fabrication of these modular structures and processing technologies after European contractors left Russia. But U.S. sanctions increasingly deterred Wison from fulfilling its contractual obligations to Novatek, and in February 2025 the company quit the Russian market. And while CNOOC did not fully withdraw from Russia, reports in 2023 indicated the company’s hesitancy to deepen its engagement, for example, by slowing down the dispatch of executives to Russian sites and delaying certain joint technology ventures. The company appeared to focus on fulfilling existing commitments without new expansion. The launch of Arctic LNG 2 at full production capacity was delayed on multiple occasions.

Generally, large and state-owned Chinese companies with significant exposure to global financial markets have tended to retain their operations in Russia. But they have also become reluctant to further deepen cooperation with Russian partners after the launch of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and instead have focused on sanctions-proofing existing agreements. Reportedly, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2022 issued guidelines for energy conglomerates to reevaluate their activities in Russia. Smaller Chinese companies have often fully abstained from cooperating with Russian partners, due to payment processing difficulties or fear of secondary sanctions. And although Russia and China in 2024 launched a regular container shipping service along the NSR, many of the joint infrastructure projects in the Russian Arctic that were planned by the two countries have stalled in recent years: In 2016, for example, the state-owned China Poly Group and the regional government of Arkhangelsk signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop a deep-sea port in Arkhangelsk. The plan envisioned a US$78 million Chinese investment and a link between the new port and the proposed Belkomur railway. However, both the port and the railway project failed to materialise under unspecified circumstances. A notable exception to this trend, however, is the shipbuilding industry, where Chinese yards have expanded their expertise in constructing Polar Code-compliant ice-going vessels, and fulfilled many Russian orders for LNG tankers and other vessels used to service Arctic energy sites.

Image: Sino-Russian joint manoeuvres during the Vostok 2018 exercise (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Secondly, while military cooperation between Russia and China in the Arctic has expanded over the past decade, it remains limited in overall scope and beset by mutual distrust. The PLA has participated in, among others, Russia’s 2018 and 2022 Vostok exercises, with the aim to increase the general interoperability between the two forces. While exercises were only staged in Arctic-adjacent regions of eastern Russia, it can nevertheless be assumed that Sino-Russian joint operations in the region would today be easier to conduct in principle.

In the naval realm, China and Russia have conducted annual joint maritime patrols in the Pacific Ocean since 2021, with increasing proximity to the Arctic Ocean. Notably, in 2023, both countries’ naval forces conducted a patrol near Alaska, marking a significant demonstration of their growing ability to jointly operate in Arctic-adjacent waters. ​In October 2024, Chinese and Russian coast guard vessels carried out their first-ever joint patrol in the northern Pacific Ocean, traversing the Bering Sea and entering the Chukchi Sea, which is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean. This operation arguably showcased readiness for cooperative maritime operations in high-latitude environments. However, these exercises have remained irregular, and their relevance is largely symbolic, with manoeuvres often conducted by coast guard vessels involved in fishing patrols or rescue missions. Exercises like Vostok or joint Sino-Russian bomber patrols have further been conducted close to Arctic lands, rather than in the Arctic Ocean or the Russian Arctic territories. They should best be seen as demonstrations of political solidarity, and not necessarily as evidence of a sustained joint military posture within the Arctic region.

The likely reason for this limitation is enduring mistrust: Russia considers the Arctic to be a vital national security frontier. In its Arctic policy and military doctrines, it presents the region as being critical to its national security interest. In comparison to China, Moscow holds vastly superior Arctic capabilities. It operates nuclear-powered icebreakers, Arctic-adapted brigades, advanced radar networks, and the various assets of the Northern Fleet. Moscow has also historically opposed any dilution of its military primacy in the Arctic by external actors, including friendly ones. By comparison, China has a minuscule military footprint in the Arctic. The PLA-Navy has little sway over supporting infrastructure in the region. China's five research icebreakers are, by definition, dual-use in nature, and offer limited operational relevance for hard-power projection. China's strategic outlook on the Arctic is also heavily influenced by economic considerations, and its strategic involvement in the NSR remains a function of its historically fickle political relations with Russia as opposed to a strategic asset that could be taken for granted.

While Arctic security cooperation between Russia and China might still accelerate, especially in the space domain, coast guard and coastal security operations - the persistent lack of deep strategic trust between Moscow and Beijing is likely to continue hampering such projects. Russian strategic thinkers have expressed significant scepticism in regards to China’s assertive 2018 ‘Arctic White Paper’. They have generally welcomed rumours that Beijing might ameliorate the document’s assertive tone. In 2020, Russia arrested a leading Arctic researcher on charges of spying for China. Pavel Ivankin, the President of Russia’s National Research Center for Transportation and Infrastructure, in March 2025 cautioned against China’s icebreaker construction, flagging the country as a potential future rival. And concerns about the security implications of the heavy demographic imbalance between Russia’s east and far north and China continue to attract the attention of Russian policy-makers.

Image: Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping on February 4, 2022, ahead of releasing a ‘Strategic Partnership Without Limits’ agreement that promised enhanced cooperation in the Arctic (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Finally, Russia and China have also come to diverge on one of the most important aspects of Arctic international relations, the region’s multi-layered governance system. While superficially, the Russian and Chinese governments have supported each other in disputes with Western states over the future of the Arctic Council, their strategic visions for the future direction of the Arctic governance system do not fully converge.

China’s involvement in the Arctic is curtailed by the fact that it is not an Arctic state. Beijing’s official strategy for the region has therefore prioritised the diplomatic and economic engagement of Arctic states. This general direction has not changed much since 2018. In order to ‘earn a place at the Arctic table’, Beijing wants to continue conducting scientific research, especially on climate change and rising sea levels, which it perceives to be a threat to its coastal regions. China also hopes to carry out maritime and commercial activities wherever possible, participate in conserving the region’s ecosystems, and to claim a greater stake in multilateral Arctic governance formats. China has consistently expressed a desire to continue cooperating with all Arctic countries, and likely perceives growing reliance on Russia as a strategic disadvantage hampering that pursuit.

Ideally, China would want to mend regional ties with the European Arctic states, as well as Greenland. In the 2010s, the country pursued cooperation projects with Finland, Sweden, Norway, Greenland and Canada, including in sensitive areas such as satellite operations and space research, rare earth mining projects, and infrastructure development. The loss of these links, as well as the perception among NATO states that China increasingly acts as a supporting force for Russia’s aggressive Arctic policy, is often complained about by Chinese observers. In a militarised Arctic, the interests of China and other outsider states would be sidelined - an insight which has spurred China to advocate for a return to ‘peaceful conditions’ and ‘cooperation’ in the region.

Russia, on the other hand, sees itself as an Arctic primus inter pares. Since 2023 at the latest, Moscow has claimed for itself a right to act unilaterally in the region. Dismayed by the Western Arctic states’ suspension of Arctic Council cooperation in March 2022, Russia suspended its payments to the Council, threatened to leave the organisation, and in 2023 deleted all mentions of multilateral cooperation from its most important Arctic strategy document. Russia has also invested significant diplomatic capital into the exploration of alternative Arctic governance formats. In 2023, Russia announced its intention to found a joint BRICS+ research station on Svalbard. Throughout 2022 and 2023, Moscow attempted to gradually introduce an Arctic governance element to cooperation among the BRICS+, and especially the organisation’s Ocean and Polar Science and Technology Working Group. These attempts failed to bear fruit, however, in part because Norway worked hard to preserve the Arctic Council during its 2023-2025 presidency - but also because China likely obstructed Russia’s attempts to politicise the Arctic activities of BRICS+.

Today, Russia and China both want to engage in multilateral cooperation in the Arctic, but the two sides disagree on who to cooperate with, and how. China would like to see the Arctic Council - and with it its observer state prerogatives - restored, and for taboos over its economic and scientific involvement in the western half of the region to fall. Russia, on the other hand, has entertained the idea to ‘globalise’ the Arctic on its own terms. Recently, Moscow has tried to involve a growing range of external countries from the Global South - including India, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, Türkiye, and even Indonesia - in its Arctic territories, as well as Arctic governance issues. Russia’s proposals for alternative Arctic governance structures involving these countries would bifurcate the Arctic into two blocs: one composed of NATO states, and one led by Russia and centred on the BRICS+. For China, this scenario would be unattractive. Beijing would be relegated to the role of an Arctic helper to Russia, in a much-diminished regional setting characterised by military confrontation. China's main Arctic interests - to conduct research, extract economic value, make Arctic shipping viable for commercial operators, and gain a seat at intra-regional governance tables - would all fall flat under these circumstances..

As in other aspects of its relations with Russia and the West, China often attempts to ‘sit on the fence’ over Arctic disputes. While it supports Russia economically and publicly proclaims solidarity with its viewpoints, in practice China often refrains from supporting Russia’s more assertive initiatives. From Moscow’s perspective, this creates a policy dilemma: ideally, Russia would want to replace lost access to Western governance forums, technologies, and markets by expanding Arctic cooperation with China, but also with India, the United Arab Emirates, and other non-Western states. Russia envisions this new grouping of Arctic partners as being centred entirely on itself. However, China is the only member of Russia’s ‘new’ Arctic partners with the capacity to provide the investments, technologies, and diplomatic clout needed to offset, at least partially, the loss of Russia’s former collaborators in the West. This gives Beijing leverage to influence the trajectory of Russia’s Arctic policy. Meanwhile, the respective strategic outlooks of Russia and China on the Arctic’s future remain contradictory. But under any circumstances, China will remain a key source of revenue, technologies, and resources for Russia, with little to no strings attached. Thus, while Russia cannot currently advance its Arctic ambitions with full backing from China, it is equally unable to do so without.

For Western decision-makers, this setup presents several opportunities. First, it would be fair to conclude that the ‘stick’ of economic sanctions has demonstrated effectiveness in slowing, or even derailing, Sino-Russian Arctic cooperation projects. A complementary ‘carrots’ approach - allowing Beijing to resume certain forms of scientific or economic cooperation with Western Arctic states while continuing to exclude strategically critical sectors - could entice China to distance itself even further from Russia’s diplomatic positions. It is therefore worth considering how China might be selectively reintegrated into certain aspects of Arctic cooperation with the West.

Second, if Russia succeeds in establishing alternative Arctic cooperation platforms with states from the ‘Global South,’ this could bolster its leverage vis-à-vis both China and the Western Arctic states. However, Western governments cannot simply block the participation of external actors in the region in response. Whether Arctic states like it or not, the region will continue to open up, especially in the maritime domain. Instead, Western Arctic states should reclaim the initiative in shaping and guiding that process. They must avoid ceding the discursive high ground on ‘globalising’ the Arctic to Russia and should continue to incorporate outsider states, such as India, into their own Arctic cooperation frameworks wherever feasible. The decision to hold a first Arctic Circle Forum in India in May 2025 is a promising step in this direction. The Greenlandic-Danish chairmanship of the Arctic Council should continue engaging India, as well as other third countries, wherever possible.

Third, the United States should urgently reconsider its plan to unilaterally re-engage Russia in the Arctic, particularly regarding its apparent aim of pulling Moscow away from China’s influence. While Russia and China may never form a true Arctic ‘alliance,’ this does not mean that their relationship in the region will stop being cooperative. In all foreseeable scenarios, China will likely remain a key Arctic partner for Russia, particularly in LNG trade, infrastructure development, and shipbuilding. Moreover, the single most effective factor that is currently preventing Sino-Russian Arctic relations from deepening further are Western sanctions against Russia, and specifically the threat of secondary sanctions emanating from the U.S. Any unilateral lifting of these sanctions would not pull Russia away from China, but rather lift most of the barriers that currently stand in the way of China assuming an even greater role in Russia’s Arctic economy.

Russia’s preference, on the other hand, would be an expansion of its Arctic cooperation with both the United States and China. Moscow would then hope to play both actors out against one another, and thereby to position itself as the key arbiter of the Arctic regional order. Meanwhile, any remaining coherence in Arctic policy between the United States, Canada, and the European states would crumble. Canada, Greenland and the European Arctic countries would continue to view Russia’s regional ambitions with scepticism. The resulting fragmentation - where Russia wold face a divided ‘Arctic Seven’ while maintaining strong ties with China, India and other interested outsiders - would ultimately benefit Moscow, without delivering Washington’s hoped-for outcome of weakening Russia’s ties with China.

Should the U.S. seek to reintegrate Russia into cooperation while also wanting to curb China’s influence in the region, a more promising strategy would be to build on the approach initiated by Norway’s Arctic Council presidency. This would involve maintaining a unified Western stance on Arctic affairs while investing significant diplomatic capital in keeping Russia engaged - even within a partially paralysed Arctic Council. Such a strategy would discourage Russia from attempting to establish a bifurcated Arctic governance structure, thereby helping to ensure that stewardship of the region remains the exclusive domain of the Arctic states themselves, and all without relinquishing sanctions as the West’s most important instruments of leverage over Russia.

Note: The final draft of this chapter was submitted in July 2025. It does not take into account more recent developments, including the latest SCO summit, the Putin–Xi meeting in Tianjin, China’s resumption of LNG imports from Russia, or its more recent dispatch of icebreakers into the Chukchi Sea. I nevertheless stand by the overall thrust of my analysis as well as the policy recommendations.