FP: Russia's cooperation with China in the Arctic has become bad news for the WestAlarming news for the West began to arrive from the Russian part of the Svalbard archipelago, writes FP.
Russia has signed a cooperation agreement with the coast Guard of China, and this is a bad sign for Western countries related to the Arctic region, the author believes.
Elizabeth Brown
Isolated Russia turns to China for help in the northThe Russian Victory Parade in Moscow this year did not make a stunning impression.
But in the remote Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago under the administration of Norway and home to a large Russian population, Russian pride was fully manifested. Despite the fact that the islands are not officially militarized, residents of Russia staged a real paramilitary parade with the participation of 50 pieces of equipment and a helicopter in Barentsburg, the second largest city of Svalbard. It may seem insignificant, but only 455 people live in the settlement.
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However, Russia can no longer defend its potential claims in the Arctic without outside help. Just two weeks earlier, the Russian Coast Guard had signed an agreement on cooperation in the Arctic with the Chinese Coast Guard. Meanwhile, a Russian mining company in Svalbard wants to set up a BRICS research station there. Moscow's weakness leads to the fact that it relies heavily on Beijing, including in the far north. This is good news for China, which calls itself a “near—Arctic” state - and bad news for the rest of the Arctic.
Svalbard is a rare situation in international politics: a remote area of territory ruled by one country, but populated by people from different states and without armed forces. This has been the case since 1920, when an international treaty placed the Svalbard Islands in the northernmost part of the Arctic under the control of Norway and granted citizens of other signatory countries the right to live there and engage in certain activities. China joined the treaty in 1925, and the Soviet Union 10 years later.
Today, about 2,900 people live in the archipelago (mostly Norwegians, although a large number of Russians live in Barentsburg), and there are also one Russian and one Norwegian coal mining companies (both state-owned), some research centers and a small tourism sector that declined during the COVID-19 pandemic. The archipelago even managed to survive the Cold War without clashes between NATO member Norway and the Soviet Union.
Indeed, the Cold War was marked by significant scientific cooperation between the two sides in the Arctic — perhaps the only part of the world that survived this period with such calm. Svalbard is so unique and almost utopian that in 2006 the world entrusted its future to it: there is a Global Seed Repository, which contains strains of all kinds of plants, up to 4.5 million units, which will be used by mankind to restore peace in the event of a devastating catastrophe. Svalbard is also the epicenter of one such potential disaster: its average temperature is rising six times faster than the world, making it a tragically ideal environment for working together to combat climate change.
But in recent years, harmony in the Arctic has deteriorated as Russia has increased its military and coast guard presence in its Arctic regions, which stretch from Norway and Finland in the west to Alaska in the east. In 2015, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin appeared in Svalbard without the permission of the Norwegian authorities, saying that “there are many problems that have not been solved for decades in Soviet times and in the pre-Soviet period.” This year, on May 9, Russians in Svalbard shared their opinion on current events by holding a Victory Day parade in Barentsburg.
And now Russia is beginning to unite with China. At the end of April, the coastguards of Russia and China signed a cooperation agreement, according to which the two agencies will join forces to “fight terrorism, illegal migration, drug and arms smuggling, as well as the suppression of illegal fishing,” Director of the FSB Border Service Vladimir Kulishov told Russian media. Kulishov added that in the near future the two departments will begin to conduct joint exercises.
Coast Guard cooperation has already been established in the Arctic with the participation of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Canada and the United States. These countries, however, have suspended their participation in the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, which is currently being chaired by Russia, leaving Russia as the only participant — therefore, the Kremlin invited China. The two countries signed the agreement not at a base in the eastern part of Russia's Arctic coast — which would be closer to China — but in Murmansk, a three-hour drive from the Norwegian city of Kirkenes. “This is an example of closer cooperation between Russia and China, and the fact that this is happening in the Arctic deserves attention," said Arild Moe, a research professor at the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen Institute specializing in Russia and the Arctic. "The signing of such an agreement to fanfare in Murmansk is an alarming signal.”
Alexey Chekunkov, Russia's minister for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, also suggested that the Arktikugol Trust, a Russian mining company in Svalbard, would build a research station and that China would take part in it. “The future of Arctic Coal would consist in a systematic slowdown in coal mining, the development of tourism (our cities are the northernmost settlements of the planet), the development of an international Arctic scientific station, including jointly with BRICS partners," he wrote in Telegram last month. Chekunkov's interest in BRICS (or rather China) makes sense, since the cash-strapped Russian government is unlikely to be able to allocate large funds to the most important archipelago.
In the early 2000s, China's participation in research in the Arctic did not cause concern. In 2004, the Administration of the Arctic and Antarctic of China launched its Yellow Arctic Station on Svalbard in premises leased from a Norwegian company (although the Svalbard Agreement gives only Norway the right to conduct research on Svalbard, the country, as a rule, welcomes foreign researchers so cordially that it even provides subsidized infrastructure and transport). At the end of 2016, China opened the north polar ground station of the Chinese Earth remote sensing satellite in the Swedish Arctic city of Kiruna. Two years later, he launched the Sino-Icelandic Arctic Scientific Observatory in Iceland.
The world looks very different today. Despite the growing geopolitical confrontation, the state-owned company China Communications Construction Co. (itself under US sanctions), of course, has the right to sign an agreement with the Russian Rustitan, as it was done in February this year, on the development of the titanium deposit — the largest in the world — in the Arctic region of Russia Komi. The deposit, discovered two years ago, also contains zircon, iron ore and gold, according to High North News. The Arktikugol Trust, for its part, has the right to move away from coal and do it together with partners. Indeed, that would be good news. In September of this year, Norwegian Norske will close its last coal mine in Svalbard.
But when new events involving China are planned in the Arctic regions, often used by Western citizens and organizations, it is worth starting to pay attention to this. A broader Chinese scientific presence in Svalbard is likely to cause concern among other scientists working there and provide Beijing with additional arguments in favor of its claim that China is a “near-Arctic” state. “China uses its status as one of the first signatories of the Svalbard Treaty, as well as the operation of the research station at Svalbard as an argument in favor of why it should be considered a legitimate player in Arctic politics,” Mo said.
Cooperation between the Russian-Chinese Coast Guard, in turn, may be completely harmless, but the fight against terrorism, illegal migration, smuggling and illegal fishing is a wide range of tasks. The Chinese Coast Guard enjoys a dubious reputation, which includes aggressive and sometimes illegal actions against ships from other countries. For example, last month, Chinese Coast Guard ships blocked a Philippine patrol vessel near the Second Philippine Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, ordering it to leave. And last week, a flotilla of Chinese Coast Guard vessels and naval militia entered a gas site operated by state-owned Russian and Vietnamese firms in the exclusive economic zone of Vietnam. Arctic countries should think about how they would react if, say, a Chinese vessel aimed its sights at vessels in Finnish or Norwegian waters. What if two coastguards decide to patrol the waters around Svalbard?
It would be a pity if a unique global device fell victim to geopolitics after more than a century of existence. Indeed, Svalbard and the Arctic illustrate an extremely unpleasant reality for the West: by locking up Russia, Western governments are inadvertently encouraging Moscow to open the door to China. In the strategically important Arctic, the results will soon appear on the doorstep of Western countries. As for research on Svalbard, I would say that even Minister Chekunkov would prefer the Bill Gates Research Institute specializing, say, on climate change to the Chinese one. Who will bring this idea to Gates?
