Arctic policy of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Russia's Arctic policy begins with a simple geographic fact: roughly one-fifth of the country lies north of the Arctic Circle. As of 2010, out of the roughly 4 million people living in the entire Arctic, about half of them were Russian citizens. No other nation came close. Yet that population has been shrinking at what Russian officials describe as an excessive rate, even as the resources and strategic importance of the region have grown.

  What Russia wants from the Arctic is spelled out in its own policy documents: natural resources, transportation lanes, ecosystems worth protecting, and a zone of peace and cooperation. The tension between those goals is not always easy to reconcile. The same waters Russia wants to keep peaceful are patrolled by the largest of its four naval fleets. The same coastlines it wants to develop are contested with neighbours who have their own continental shelf claims. And the same ice it needs for scientific research is melting faster than predicted.

  Russia's engagement with the Arctic stretches back to 1032, when a Novgorodian explorer named Uleb made the first recorded voyage into those waters. Nearly a thousand years later, in August 2007, a Russian expedition planted a flag on the seabed at the North Pole itself. Between those two moments lies a story of exploration, competing claims, military investment, and some of the largest energy deposits on the planet.

• 2. A Thousand Years of Exploration

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  Uleb's voyage to the Kara Sea in 1032 opened a slow-moving frontier. Over the following five centuries, coastal dwellers of the White Sea called pomors pushed steadily along the Arctic shoreline, reaching the Ob and Yenisey rivers and founding trading posts at a settlement known as Mangazeya. The prizes drawing them were furs, walrus ivory, and mammoth ivory.

  The Siberian Cossacks extended that reach further. Under Mikhail Stadukhin, they arrived at the Kolyma River by 1644. Ivan Moskvitin had already discovered the Sea of Okhotsk in 1639, and in 1648 Fedot Alekseyev Popov and Semyon Dezhnyov sailed through what would later be called the Bering Strait. Dezhnyov went on to establish the first permanent Russian settlement near present-day Anadyr.

  The decisive leap came after Peter I took the throne. Russia began building a navy, and with it came systematic exploration rather than ad hoc ventures. Vitus Bering explored Kamchatka in 1728. His aides Ivan Fyodorov and Mikhail Gvozdev reached Alaska in 1732. Then came the Great Northern Expedition of 1733-1743, one of the largest exploration enterprises in recorded history. Bering and Aleksei Chirikov led the overall mission, with their own party discovering southern Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and the Commander Islands. Other parties under Stepan Malygin, Dmitry Ovtsyn, Fyodor Minin, Semyon Chelyuskin, Vasily Pronchischev, Khariton Laptev, and Dmitry Laptev charted most of Russia's Arctic coastline from the White Sea all the way to the mouth of the Kolyma River. The expedition produced 62 large maps and charts of the region. That cartographic inheritance would later form the basis for something far more consequential: a set of territorial claims reaching to the North Pole.

• 3. Claiming the Seabed

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  Modern Russian territorial claims in the Arctic officially date to the 15th of April 1926, when the Soviet Union asserted rights over lands and islands between two meridians spanning most of the Arctic sector. The claim applied specifically to islands and lands, not to the ocean floor. That limitation would matter enormously decades later.

  The first maritime boundary between Russia and Norway was drawn in 1957, covering the Varangerfjord. Continental shelf claims in the 1960s reopened the question, and informal talks began in the 1970s over the Barents Sea. Russia's preferred boundary would have given it 67,000 square miles more than the eventual compromise. On the 15th of September 2010, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov signed a treaty dividing the disputed territory roughly in half and agreeing to co-manage overlapping resources. The two countries had already been jointly managing fisheries in the Barents through the Grey Zone Agreement, signed in 1978 and renewed annually.

  The deeper contest concerned the ocean floor. Russia ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the 12th of March 1997. Under that framework, Russia submitted a claim on the 20th of December 2001, to an extended continental shelf beyond its standard 200-mile exclusive economic zone. The argument rested on two underwater mountain chains - the Lomonosov and Mendeleev ridges - which Russia said were geological extensions of the Eurasian continent. The UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf neither accepted nor rejected the claim and asked for more supporting data. Russia planned to resubmit with additional evidence in 2012.

  The Arktika 2007 expedition in August of that year was the most dramatic move in that legal campaign. Led by Artur Chilingarov, the expedition became the first to reach the seabed at the North Pole and planted a Russian flag there. Rock, mud, water, and plant samples were brought back to Moscow. The Natural Resources Ministry compared those samples to material from known continental shelves, using them to support the claim that the Lomonosov Ridge connects to Russian territory. Both the United States and Canada called the flag planting legally meaningless. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov agreed with that characterization, telling reporters that the goal was not to stake a claim but to prove that the Russian shelf extended to the Pole. He compared the act to the American flag planted on the Moon.

• 4. The Northern Sea Route

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  Sailing from Europe to Asia through the Arctic takes roughly one-third the distance required through the Suez Canal, and without the risk of pirates. Russia has known this for centuries. The Northern Sea Route, defined by Russian legislation and stretching from the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait, is the economic artery at the centre of Russia's Arctic ambitions.

  The route is not easy. Even when officially open, it is not fully ice-free. Russian icebreaker support and navigational guidance are required to keep it safe. As of the time of the source material, the route was open for up to eight weeks a year. Climate change was expected to extend that window, and traffic projections were striking: the Russian government estimated that annual cargo could reach 85 million metric tons, and that the route could eventually carry a quarter of all cargo between Europe and Asia by 2030. In 2010, six tankers completed the crossing. But total cargo that year was 1.5 million metric tons, a fraction of what the projections imagined.

  In August 2011, Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Russian Security Council, noted that the poor condition of Arctic infrastructure was holding back development, especially in the eastern portion of the country where resources are concentrated. Economic sanctions imposed in 2014 added another obstacle: total voyages through the route fell from 71 to 53 that year. Russian Railways had plans to connect the towns of Indiga and Amderma to its railway network by 2030. Prime Minister Putin announced a year-round port on the Yamal Peninsula, on top of separate plans to build a $33 billion year-round Arctic port elsewhere. The Ministry of Economic Development also identified eight Arctic Support Zones along the coast - Kola, Arkhangelsk, Nenets, Vorkuta, Yamal-Nenets, Taimyr-Turukhan, North Yakutia, and Chukotka - to focus investment without limiting Russian presence to resource extraction alone.

• 5. Resources and Their Obstacles

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  The U.S. Geological Survey estimated 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas north of the Arctic Circle. Roughly 10 percent of the world's petroleum resources are believed to sit in the Arctic. The dominant share of those offshore deposits falls within the currently uncontested exclusive economic zones of the five Arctic Ocean nations, not in disputed territory.

  Russia has been moving to access its share. Gazprom connected the Yamal Peninsula, home to Russia's largest natural gas reserves, to the national network through the Obskaya-Bovanenkovo Line, which opened in 2010 as part of Gazprom's broader Yamal project. The Prirazlomnoye field, an offshore deposit in the Pechora Sea designed to include up to 40 wells, was under construction and expected to become the world's first ice-resistant oil platform and the first offshore Arctic platform.

  The economics were not straightforward. The International Energy Agency estimated that most Arctic fields are unprofitable when world oil prices fall below $120 per barrel. As of May 2017, the price of Brent crude had fallen to around $50. Russian law further complicated the picture by limiting Arctic continental shelf extraction to the two state companies, Gazprom and Rosneft. Neither had all the technology needed on its own, pushing them toward foreign partnerships. In August 2011, Rosneft signed a deal with ExxonMobil exchanging some of Exxon's global assets for joint Arctic development rights. That agreement included a $3.2 billion hydrocarbon exploration program in the Kara and Black seas and joint work on ice-resistant drilling platforms. A similar earlier attempt between Rosneft and BP had failed. Chevron was also in talks with Rosneft about Arctic resource development.

  Environmental pressure shadowed all of it. Greenpeace had staged protests against Gazprom's Prirazlomnaya platform in August 2012, and returned in September 2013. On September 18, the Greenpeace vessel MV Arctic Sunrise attempted to board the platform. The Russian Coast Guard seized the ship and detained its crew. Phil Radford, executive director of Greenpeace USA, described the arrest of what became known as the Arctic 30 as the harshest governmental response Greenpeace had faced since the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985. Russian authorities initially sought to charge the activists with piracy, a crime carrying a maximum penalty of fifteen years imprisonment. The crew of 30 came from 19 countries and were held for 48 hours in Murmansk.

• 6. Military and Icebreakers

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  The Russian Northern Fleet, the largest of Russia's four naval fleets, is based in Severomorsk on the Kola Gulf along the Barents Sea. As of 2013, it held approximately 35 submarines, six missile cruisers, and the flagship Petr Velikiy - Peter the Great - a nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser. The Northern Fleet accounted for roughly two-thirds of Russia's total naval power, with close to 80 operational ships.

  In 2012 the Russian Navy resumed naval patrols of the Northern Sea Route, including a 2,000-mile patrol by ten ships led by an icebreaker and the Petr Velikiy. In June 2008, Russian military officials reportedly announced plans to increase the operational radius of the Northern Fleet's submarines. In 2014, the Northern Fleet Joint Strategic Command was formally established. President Medvedev's Arctic policy statement, approved on the 18th of September 2008, explicitly called for improved military forces in the Arctic to ensure military security and for stronger border guard operations.

  Parallel to the naval force runs a fleet of an entirely different kind. The nuclear icebreaker Lenin began operating on the Northern Sea Route in July 1960, the first of its kind anywhere. Russia has since built ten nuclear-powered civilian vessels in total, including nine icebreakers, though three have been decommissioned, including the Lenin. The remaining nuclear icebreaker fleet includes six vessels, among them the 50 Let Pobedy - meaning 50 Years of Victory - the largest nuclear icebreaker in the world. Russia also operates 19 diesel polar icebreakers. Plans at the time of the source material called for six more icebreakers to be built. On the 28th of September 2011, President Medvedev signed Decree No. 1256, lifting the ban on privatization of the nuclear icebreaker fleet, allowing the state company Atomflot to accept at least partial private investment while the government retained a controlling share.

• 7. Research and Drift Stations

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  Russia is the only country in the world that operates drift stations: research facilities seasonally deployed on floating sea ice, moving with it as it drifts across the Arctic Ocean. The first, called North Pole-1, was established on the 21st of May 1937, by the Soviet Union. Drifting station North Pole-38 was established in October 2010.

  Russian Arctic research covers the seabed, marine life, meteorology, and natural resources. A significant portion of recent work has been explicitly tied to the territorial claim over the Lomonosov Ridge. In July 2011, the icebreaker Rossiya and the research vessel Akademik Fyodorov conducted seismic studies north of Franz Josef Land to gather geological evidence for that claim. The Akademik Fyodorov and the icebreaker Yamal had carried out a similar mission the year before.

  Not all research was focused inward. The Lena-2011 expedition, a joint Russian-German project, left for the Laptev Sea and the Lena River in summer 2011. It was led by Jörn Thiede, who also chaired the European Arctic Commission. Its goals included studying Siberian climate patterns and gathering data on the Russian continental shelf. Thiede expressed confidence that Russia would collect the evidence needed to confirm its extended shelf claim. Research stations were also under construction in 2011: one on Samoylovsky Island, planned for completion by mid-2012 and focused on shelf zone permafrost; and one on the Svalbard Islands, expected to be finished in 2013 and dedicated to geophysical, hydrological, and geological work. Over the summer of 2015, Russia also completed a large Federal Security Service border guard base on Alexandra Land island in the Franz Joseph Land archipelago, built on an existing airbase called Nagurskoye above the 80th parallel. The new facility could house 150 soldiers for up to 18 months without resupply.

• 8. Gorbachev's Opening and What Followed

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  On the 1st of October 1987, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a speech in Murmansk that set out six Arctic goals in a single address. He called for a nuclear-free zone in Northern Europe, reduced military activity in the Baltic, Northern, Norwegian, and Greenland seas, cooperative resource development, an international conference on Arctic scientific research, joint environmental protection, and the opening of the Northern Sea Route to international use. The speech became known as the Murmansk Initiative.

  That cooperative spirit had uneven results over the following decades. The May 2008 Arctic Ocean Conference in Ilulissat, Greenland brought together foreign ministers and other officials from Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States. The resulting Ilulissat Declaration stated that disputes over Arctic territory should be resolved bilaterally between the parties involved rather than through any new multilateral regime. The Russia-Norway treaty signed in 2010 exemplified exactly that approach.

  Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky, commander of the Russian Navy, was quoted on the 4th of October 2010, as warning that China and other states were advancing their interests in the Arctic aggressively, and that Russia would not give up a single inch of the region. That statement captured the distance Russia had traveled from the cooperative tone of 1987. Whether those two impulses - international law and strategic resolve - can be held together is the question that Russia's Arctic policy has never fully answered, and the answer may depend partly on what the melting ice eventually reveals beneath the seabed.