The fallout from Russia‘s attack on Ukraine has already reached the top of the world.
The West’s cooperation with Moscow in the Arctic, already strained after years of Russian military buildup in the icy region, has now ground to a halt amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The eight-member Arctic Council, which Russia currently chairs, has effectively paused operations, shelving a crucial forum for Washington, Moscow and the six other member nations to tackle and sidestep clashes over key issues such as climate change, energy and economic resources and military activity in the high north.
At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed that his unprovoked military campaign in Ukraine won’t sidetrack the Kremlin’s quickly expanding Arctic ambitions. Long before the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin had targeted the region as a key to Russia‘s economic development, and the crushing set of Western sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its Ukraine invasion have only made the Arctic even more pivotal for Russia‘s financial future.
“Taking into account all kinds of external restrictions and sanctions pressure, special attention must be paid to all projects and plans related to the Arctic,” Mr. Putin said last week, according to the state-run Tass news agency. “Not to postpone them, not to shift them right, but, instead, we must respond to attempts to curb our development with maximum increase of the pace of work both on current and upcoming tasks.”
The region is widely seen as a key economic hub in the 21st century as sea ice melts and new shipping lanes open for the first time in centuries. As Russia forges ahead in the Arctic despite widespread condemnation over its actions in Ukraine, global leaders say the end result is a much more fragile security situation. Russia‘s willingness to launch a full-blown military assault on a neighbor, officials suggest, could signal that it’s also willing to use force to achieve its strategic goals in the Arctic, including claiming sea routes as its own and exploiting the region’s vast energy supplies.
“Russia’s war against Ukraine is a watershed moment. It is a new normal for European security. And also for Arctic security,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, whose home country of Norway is a prime competitor of Moscow in the race to exploit Arctic opportunities, said in a recent speech on Arctic security, an address that was delivered after Moscow‘s invasion of Ukraine began.
“In the last few years, we have seen a significant increase in Russian military activity here. Russia has re-established Soviet-era Arctic bases. This is a test bed for many of Russia’s novel weapon systems. It is the home of Russia’s strategic submarine fleet,” he said. “Russia’s military build-up is the most serious challenge to stability and allied security in the high north.”
Indeed, global security analysts say Russia has built or reactivated 13 air bases in the Arctic, in addition to other military facilities there. Mr. Putin‘s military already has the world’s largest fleet of icebreakers, dwarfing that of the U.S. It has also invested heavily in submarines able to operate in the Arctic.
The U.S. and its NATO allies are racing to catch up. Recent U.S. military budgets have invested heavily in the Arctic. But the balance of wartime power remains roughly equal, according to a recent comprehensive study on Arctic power by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
“In high-intensity conflict scenarios, there exists a balance of power in the [Arctic] between Russia and NATO,” the study reads in part.
There also exists great risk for the peaceful competition so far in the Arctic to quickly spiral out of control.
“This balance is, however, highly offense dominated,” RUSI said in a summary of its report. “In other words, both sides are effective on the offensive but suffer from defensive vulnerabilities that make a reactive posture difficult to execute. This creates the potential for NATO to offset its lack of mass in theaters like the Baltics through horizontal escalation, but also raises the risks of mutual miscalculation in a crisis.”
A new reality
Against that backdrop, tensions between Arctic nations are rising fast. Sweden and Finland, both members of the Arctic Council, signaled this week that they could announce plans to join NATO within just a matter of weeks. Russia responded by making thinly veiled threats at both nations.
The announcements from Helsinki and Stockholm came after the Arctic Council virtually froze its operations last month following Russia‘s assault on Ukraine. The other seven nations on the Council — the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway — said that “Russia‘s flagrant violation” of the Council‘s principles led to the move.
Representatives from the other Arctic Council nations met two weeks ago in Anchorage to map out a future without Russia.
“The Russia we see today is an aggressive, violent war machine,” Anniken Ramberg Krutnes, Norway’s ambassador to the U.S., said at the Anchorage gathering, adding that Moscow‘s time as an Arctic partner is over.
“We have to admit that that’s over now,” she said, according to the news outlet Arctic Today. “Now we have to proceed without them.”
It’s unclear when the Council could resume full, normal operations. Last year, before its two-year chairmanship began, Russian officials vowed to use the international body as a forum to discuss “national security” matters. That guarantee came in spite of the Council‘s 1996 charter, which says that “the Arctic Council should not deal with matters related to military security.”
While Arctic nations say there are some areas where cooperation with Russia remains vital, the fact that Mr. Putin was willing to launch an unprovoked war against his neighbor in eastern Europe inevitably colors what he might do in a similar clash of interests in the Arctic, Andreas Osthagen, a senior fellow at the Arctic Institute’s Center for Circumpolar Security Studies and a senior research fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway, told Scientific American last month.
“We have to be prepared, and we have to assume that there might be deliberate attempts by Russia to undermine Arctic cooperation or NATO’s cooperation in the Arctic, and use the Arctic to gain some sort of benefit that we are probably unable to see,” Mr. Osthagen said.
Now, Russian officials are arguing the opposite. They say that it is the West that is weakening Arctic security by temporarily suspending Council operations and that the body should resume its work despite the war in Ukraine.
“The Council‘s mandate explicitly excludes matters related to military security,” Nikolay Korchunov, Russia‘s ambassador-at-large to the Council, recently told Newsweek. “It is enshrined in all its founding and strategic documents that the Arctic should remain as the territory of peace, stability and constructive cooperation. Therefore, this unique format should not be subject to the spillover effect of any extra-regional events.”
The suspension “initiated by the Western states, could lead to the accumulation of the risks and challenges to soft security in the region which the Council has been addressing effectively,” he said.