Planting Flags

In 2007, the Russian explorer Artur Chilingarov led an expedition that planted the Russian flag on the North Pole seabed, focusing Western attention on the exaggerated idea of a “race for the Arctic.” Since then, Russia has redeveloped and modernized several of its Cold War bases.

Yet Moscow’s Northern Fleet, charged with patrolling the Northern Sea Route along Russia’s long Arctic coastline, still faces issues with aging infrastructure and limited capacity for repair. For their part, other Arctic states were hardly sitting passively by until Russian provocations stirred them into action.

The Northern Fleet is based in Severomorsk, on northwestern Russia’s Kola Peninsula. The Ukrainian Air Force reported in July 2024 that one of its drones had targeted two bombers stationed elsewhere on the peninsula at Olenya, more than one thousand miles away from the Ukrainian front line. The return of war to the Arctic was now undeniable.

The Russian Air Force had unquestionably been using Olenya to fight its war in Ukraine. While the Russian authorities denied that the drone attack had taken place, planes parked at Olenya have since been covered in tires to confuse drone targeting systems.

While Olenya is an example of the Arctic’s involvement in conventional warfare, many of the new military technologies on display in the region are not packaged as such. Instead, “dual-use” installations, which perform civilian functions but could in theory serve military purposes, are standard.

The United States and its allies have consistently decried the dual-use element of Russian or Chinese infrastructure in the Arctic, with weather stations potentially functioning as missile detectors or ports built for economic means that could be adapted to host warships. The Danish government blocked the efforts of a Chinese mining company to purchase Grønnedal, an old abandoned naval facility in southern Greenland, in the light of precisely such concerns.

But NATO members build or adapt dual-use facilities, too, highlighting and celebrating their potential military functions as they do so. According to Rasmus Gjedssø Bertelsen, Barents Chair in Politics at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, we can observe “a well-documented history of dual-use US Arctic science.” In general, he says, “great-power science and technology is often strategic science and technology.”

Bertelsen believes the idea of “Arctic exceptionalism,” which depicted the Arctic as somehow being isolated from trends in international politics, has long been misguided:

The Arctic reflects international order. . . . When you have nuclear bipolarity, during the Cold War, you have a highly militarized, highly nuclearized bipolar Arctic. When the world order was unipolar, you had this liberal circumpolar Arctic order, and now that the world is becoming less unipolar, you have a less unipolar Arctic.

Security in a Multipolar Arctic

Managing this “less unipolar Arctic” is a significant challenge, and one to which treaties and realities on the ground will have to adjust. Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago where Russia has a presence under the terms of its 1920 governing treaty, which also forbids the use of the islands for “warlike purposes.”

However, there are several facilities in operation there, controlled by Norway and Russia, which could conceivably serve a military function if either state decided to bend or break that rule. Scientific stations could collect data for military purposes, and Svalbard’s main port could be a refueling stop for military vessels.

In January 2022, one of the communications cables connecting Svalbard to the Norwegian mainland was cut. Reports have linked this with the presence of two Russian trawlers at the time. Whatever the true cause may have been, the episode reveals the vulnerability of the archipelago in a time of conflict.

Arctic scholars have long commented on such vulnerabilities, with almost every paper on Arctic security name-checking the “GIUK Gap.” This is a term that refers to the two areas of ocean separating Greenland from Iceland and Iceland from the UK. Between Bear Island, in the south of the Svalbard archipelago, and the Norwegian mainland lies the “Bear Gap.”

Russia’s “Bastion” defense system operates around these “gaps.” This is a series of nuclear submarines and air defense units that are designed both to protect the Russian Arctic and to act as a nuclear deterrent. In any future conflict, this system would be a vital tool in preserving Russian access to the North Atlantic, but it remains a defensive one.

The worry in NATO countries is that Russia is pouring more and more resources into control of the Arctic Ocean. But we can see similar moves afoot in North America, with the United States looking to invest in a series of new icebreakers. While cost issues have delayed the construction of a new deepwater port in Nome, on the far edge of Alaska, the project also demonstrates an intent to increase the US Arctic presence.

Arctic Life in a Country at War

While most dual-use capacities remain, thankfully, largely hypothetical, the familiar signs of war are returning to Chukotka, Russia’s easternmost okrug. The Bering Strait, just 55 miles wide at its narrowest point, separates Chukotka from Alaska. Chinese and Russian ships passed through the strait last October on their way to a first joint patrol in the Arctic Ocean.

During the Cold War, the region was home to radar installations, and there were even entire secret towns designed to hold nuclear missiles. This brought a flood of immigration from other parts of Russia to the isolated region. With Chukotka’s population soaring, indigenous peoples were suddenly a minority among the military personnel newly arrived in their homelands.

The way of life of the Siberian Yupik, an Arctic indigenous group of around 1,650 people, suffered acutely during these years, with hunting in the Bering Strait restricted. When the Cold War ended, Chukotka’s population dipped following the departure of the weapons and those who serviced them, and the Yupik were abandoned once again. Today, with Russia recruiting those who have formerly served in the army to fight in Ukraine, indigenous people are dying far from home.

One Yupik woman who fled the Russian far east a decade ago, but still speaks to people from home, says the aftermath of the invasion plunged Yupik culture back into crisis:

The first draft only took native people. . . . Our hunters, we go after whales and seals, so they’re skilled snipers. . . . Then, because the best elite hunters, native hunters, were drafted, the others follow. Because they became heroes. They wanted to follow their footsteps.

Dmitriy Oparin is an anthropologist, formerly of Moscow State University, who visited Chukotka on several research trips before 2020 and remains in contact with residents. He suggests that while this picture may well be accurate, those who have previously served in the army were more likely to be recruited. With enlistment in the army offering a way to escape difficult circumstances in Russia’s far east, there were several indigenous former soldiers in Chukotka.

From the Yupik-majority village of Novoe Chaplino, a tiny settlement with a population of around four hundred, between ten and twenty men volunteered or were recruited to fight in Ukraine. At least five of them have since died.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been efforts to reduce the damage to indigenous livelihoods. On October 4, 2022, two Siberian men fled across the Bering Strait to Alaska to avoid mobilization. A week later, a message circulated on Chukotkan WhatsApp channels explicitly linked indigenous mobilization to the risk of “the disappearance of these peoples from the face of the Earth.”

Later that month, perhaps in recognition of these concerns, Chukotka’s then governor Roman Kopin made an announcement on his Telegram page. Since “reindeer herding farms and sea hunter communities ensure food security for the district and rural settlements,” he declared, people who worked in those indigenous professions would be exempt from the second mobilization of troops. However, this did not save those who were already fighting.

With several hunters already dead, and their region otherwise broadly ignored by the Russian state, Siberian Yupik culture may well continue to decline. Abstract language about “security” and “gaps,” while it might help us understand the potential for worst-case scenarios, tends to ignore these sorts of human impacts.

While the Arctic is most certainly no “exceptional” place of harmony, Arctic states must do all they can to prevent military growth from becoming the governing logic on top of the world. Stunts like Camp Century may now seem a quirk of a mad era, but there are few signs that our own era is any saner.