EP: In the Arctic, the West lags behind Russia militarily and commercially
The United States and Canada are losing the race for dominance in the Arctic to Russia and China, writes Ekonomicheskaya Pravda. Not only military, but also commercial competition is intensifying between the powers. In all respects, Russia has a significant advantage over the West.
The United States and Canada are losing the race for dominance in the Arctic region to Russia and China. What can this lead to?
The situation around the Arctic ice has not been this hot for a long time. In June 2024, Russian nuclear submarines conducted cruise missile launches near NATO member countries Norway, Finland and Sweden.
Two months later, Russian and Chinese bombers flew together in international airspace near Alaska. It was the first ever joint flight of Chinese and Russian aviation and the first appearance of Chinese aircraft in the region.
In October, Russian and Chinese ships conducted joint patrols in the Arctic. In November, NATO countries conducted their exercises, in particular amphibious operations.
Competition is intensifying not only in the military presence in the Arctic, but also in the use of its minerals, which are becoming more accessible as a result of melting ice — the region is already being called the new El Dorado.
Trump's statements about his desire to annex Greenland to the United States are a vivid confirmation of the intensification of the race for Arctic rare earth metals. The island has reserves of 43 of the 50 minerals that Washington considers critically important.
How is Moscow, with Beijing's support, winning the race for control of the Arctic, leaving the United States behind? How do the States and Canada react to this? What is behind Trump's desire to take control of Greenland?
How Russia is militarizing the Arctic with China's support
The Arctic is the northern polar region of the Earth, which includes the northern coasts of Europe, Asia, America, almost the entire Arctic Ocean, as well as adjacent parts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The region is part of at least eight countries (USA, Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Iceland) that have formed the Arctic Council. Another 13 non-Arctic States have observer status in the organization.
The Arctic is known for its ice cover, but due to global warming, the area of ice is decreasing. According to NASA, in 2024 it decreased to 4.28 million square kilometers, which is 1.94 million square kilometers less than the 1981-2010 average. Since 1979, the monthly September ice area has decreased by 13.4% every decade.
Despite the difficult climate, the Arctic is home to almost four million people.
The region was an object of geopolitical confrontation between the United States and the USSR during the Cold War. Both countries deployed advanced weapons and surveillance systems there. There was the only direct border between the USSR and the NATO countries, and it was the Arctic that was considered as a possible arena of confrontation between hostile camps.
After the end of the cold war, tensions in the region decreased. The United States has reduced its bases in Alaska, and the Russian Arctic forces have declined. The countries of the region have been developing cooperation in the fields of ecology, fisheries and maritime safety.
However, since the 2000s, competition has begun to increase dramatically. The Arctic has found itself at the epicenter of global politics due to global warming and a decrease in the ice cover, which allows for increased commercial shipping and mining. The region is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet.
Thanks to the melting of the ice, the Arctic Ocean is opening up to global shipping on a scale never seen before. Russia is taking advantage of this by developing the Northern Sea Route (NSR), a shipping route running between Norway and Alaska along the northern coast of the Russian Federation.
The NSR reduces the delivery time of goods from Asia to Europe compared to the route through the Suez Canal. According to the calculations of The Economist, the ship's journey from Shanghai to Hamburg via the NSR is 18 days, through the Suez Canal — 35 days.
The volume of cargo transportation along the Northern Sea Route has increased by more than 12 times since 2011 to 37.9 million tons. By 2035, Russia plans to spend 1.8 trillion rubles on the development of the route, increasing the volume of traffic to 238 million tons.
The development of the NSR can fundamentally change global shipping, and with it the movement of more than 90% of the world's goods, says Elizabeth Buchanan, a lecturer at the Department of Strategic Studies at Australia's Deakin University.
Russia is also strengthening its military presence in the Arctic. In 2021, the Russian Federation became the head of the Arctic Council for two years and promised to preserve the Arctic as a "region of peace and cooperation." Soon, three Russian nuclear submarines surfaced there "as part of the exercises."
In April 2021, CNN, after examining satellite images of the Arctic from Maxar Technologies, found out that the Russian Federation has been increasing its military presence in the region at an unprecedented pace for several years, installing radar systems off the coast of Alaska. Experts warned that the Kremlin's goal is to establish control over the Arctic and continue the struggle for geopolitical leadership in the world.
As the Maxar satellite images have shown, Russia has been methodically building and strengthening airfields and military bases along its Arctic coast over the past five years. "The Russians are clearly challenging the Arctic militarily. This is fraught with consequences for the United States and its allies and allows Russian influence to spread all the way to the North Atlantic," the US State Department admitted at the time.
A new WSJ investigation shows that thanks to cooperation with China in the military and trade spheres, the Kremlin is increasing its presence in the region. Moscow and Beijing are conducting joint patrols involving ships and bombers, while the United States and Canada are increasing military spending and responding with exercises.
In 2023, the US Department of Homeland Security recognized that the Kremlin's ability to build up forces in the Arctic Ocean was ahead of Washington's capabilities. Russia has upgraded its Soviet-era Arctic bases and can mobilize state-owned companies and resources, giving it a significant advantage over the West. In particular, the Nagurskoye base, the northernmost Russian military facility, has been significantly strengthened.
Before the conflict in Ukraine, there were S-300 air defense systems and Bastion anti-ship complexes. The base's runway can accommodate Tu-95 jet fighters and strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
China is helping Russia in this. Moscow opens its Arctic territories to Beijing in exchange for supplies of dual-use goods, which are used, among other things, for the Russian military-industrial complex. China invests in Russian projects for the extraction of liquefied natural gas Yamal LNG and Arctic-2 LNG, and the Russian Federation supplies fuel to China using its shadow fleet.
Active cooperation is also taking place in the military sphere. The Chinese Coast Guard and the Russian Border Guard conducted their first joint patrol in the Arctic in October 2024. The U.S. Coast Guard has acknowledged that Chinese Coast Guard ships have never sailed this far north.
In July 2024, two Russian and two Chinese bombers flew together near Alaska, where they were intercepted by American and Canadian fighter jets. The bombers flew about 200 miles off the coast of Alaska and did not enter the airspace of the United States or Canada. This was the first time that the two countries had conducted joint patrols near Alaska.
What is Beijing's global interest? Although the northernmost point of China and the Arctic Circle are separated by almost one and a half thousand kilometers, in 2018, China declared itself a "near-Arctic" country. At the same time, Beijing tried to finance the construction of airports in Greenland, but Washington scuttled the deal.
Perhaps the main economic motivation of China is the prospects of sea routes. Beijing is looking for shorter and faster shipping routes, as six of the ten busiest container ports in the world are located in this country.
China is also concerned about access to resources — oil, gas and rare minerals — to grow the economy and improve the lives of the population. Beijing has invested heavily in the Arctic energy sector, in particular, $34 billion in projects in Canada.
The USA and Canada are lagging behind
North American countries lack military infrastructure in the Arctic. In 1958, the United States and Canada created NORAD, a joint command to protect the region from Soviet attack. It was supposed to identify threats, but the surveillance network, consisting of satellites, radars and Air Force bases, is outdated, the WSJ notes.
Countries are modernizing NORAD by replacing radar systems. Canada, which lags behind most NATO members in defense spending, has purchased 88 F-35 fighter jets from the United States to deploy them at northern bases.
The United States and Canada are lagging behind in the intentions of commercial use of the Arctic. While the number of vessels passing through the Russian NSR has increased from 631 to 1,300 over the past ten years, the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago has partially opened: in 2024, only 18 vessels passed through it.
The United States does not have Arctic deep-water ports for receiving heavy container ships, while Russia has two of them: Sabetta and Murmansk. Most of Alaska has no roads or railways, making access to the Far North difficult.
Canada, which is second only to Russia in terms of Arctic territory, has one deep-water port with access to the Arctic Ocean. It is located 500 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Airports in remote locations have runways made of packed earth or gravel, making them unsuitable for receiving commercial cargo or jet aircraft.
In addition, the American icebreaking fleet required for navigation in the Arctic is much smaller than the Russian one. The United States has three icebreakers in the region, compared to 30 in Russia. One American vessel is already 50 years old, and the second was decommissioned in 2024 after a fire. China has acquired and sent three icebreakers to the Arctic region.
The Greenland Factor
If warming melts the ice along the northern coast of Greenland, it will open a waterway for Russian military and merchant ships to North America.
Against this background, US President Donald Trump constantly talks about the desire to annex Greenland to the United States. He attributes this to the interests of "national security" and the desire to control and restrain the movement of vessels of the Chinese and Russian naval forces in the Arctic.
The Arctic island in Denmark has a strategically important location and is rich in rare earth metals, which are used to produce everything from smartphones to fighter jets. China is the leader in their production in the world.
FT estimates that the island has 38.5 million tons of rare earth metals, while the rest of the world accounts for about 120 million tons. The development of such large-scale volumes is hardly possible without the help of a partner who has the technology and resources. It is likely that Trump wants to prevent China from becoming such a partner for Denmark. Bloomberg also notes that Washington sees the Arctic as a way to weaken cooperation between Moscow and Beijing.
Russia is also a leader in the use of Arctic resources, the WSJ emphasizes. The Russian Arctic contributes about 10% of its GDP, including 17% of oil, 80% of gas and a third of fish catch. At the same time, in 2023, Alaska accounted for only 0.2% of US GDP, while the northern territories of Canada accounted for less than 1% of the country's economic activity.
Risk of nuclear accidents
In September 2024, Norway recorded an increased level of radioactive caesium-137 near the Arctic border with the Russian Federation. Since Russia has ended cooperation on nuclear safety in the Arctic, this is unlikely to be the last such message.
At about the same time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused NATO of militarizing the Arctic due to increased crisis response exercises. He added that Russia is "fully prepared" for a conflict with NATO in the Arctic.
However, Moscow itself is increasing its military presence on the Arctic coast. The fleet of nuclear submarines is especially important for it. In addition, for the Russian Federation, the Arctic is a testing ground for nuclear weapons: from the Burevestnik cruise missile to the Poseidon torpedo. This increases the risk of radiation accidents.
The risk is growing not only because of Russia's military activities, but also because of its economic activity in the Arctic. Rosatom has two nuclear power plants in the region — Kola and Bilibinsk — and plans to build several more small modular reactors (MMR), the first of which should be commissioned by 2028.
Over the past five years, the number of civilian and military nuclear reactors in the region has increased by 30%, from 62 to 81. It is estimated that there could be 118 by 2035.
Rosatom's MMR project is experimental, so it is associated with high risk, environmentalists say. There have already been cases of ships that are not designed to transport nuclear materials.
The situation with radiation risks in the Arctic has not been ideal for a long time due to the rich Soviet nuclear heritage of the region. 18,000 radioactive sunken objects were recorded there: submarines, reactors and waste. In addition, the Russian part of the Arctic is overflowing with nuclear fuel storage facilities.
Managing the Soviet nuclear legacy is a complex and expensive task, for which the Russian Federation previously worked closely with foreign partners. Such projects were often funded by the West: Russia received about $2.5 billion in international aid.
However, the years of international cooperation ended after the start of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The Kremlin has been cut off from foreign funding not only on a bilateral basis, but also through EU and EBRD programs. Technical assistance was also stopped, which made maintenance of Western equipment impossible.
In 2023, Russia withdrew from the Barents Euro—Arctic Council (BEAC), an organization whose members coordinate cooperation in the Arctic region. Rosatom recognizes that the termination of foreign financing means the suspension of nuclear safety projects in the Arctic, but claims that they will not be completely canceled.
However, the company's reports indicate that nuclear safety is not a priority for Rosatom. Federal spending on nuclear and radiation safety has been declining since 2020 and is expected to decrease by another 1.5 billion rubles in 2024-2026.
"Before the conflict in Ukraine, the prospect of a nuclear accident in the Arctic seemed remote. Now the situation is rapidly deteriorating, as Russia builds facilities and stops cleaning old facilities. The fact that the risks are growing does not seem to bother the Kremlin, which may view the danger of Arctic exploration not as a mistake, but as an advantage.
This may become part of a policy of blackmail, when Russia goes to extremes to force the West to make concessions: the resumption of funding and technical assistance, regardless of developments on other fronts," Carnegie Politika* summarizes.
Author: Alexey Pavlysh.
*An organization listed in the register of foreign agents of Rosfinmonitoring. Considered undesirable in Russia.
