In September 2024, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that Russia was ‘fully ready’ to defend its interests in the Arctic region. He referred specifically to one NATO member, Norway, but had in mind what Russia sees as a general threat along its borders. Lavrov’s hawkish warning has since been repeated by other Kremlin spokespeople. In fact, Russian leaders have moved inexorably over the past quarter century to prepare for confrontation in the Arctic. Their preparedness reflects growing confidence that much of the Arctic belongs to Russia. And just as it invaded Ukraine and now threatens to use nuclear weapons on European nations, so it pursues militarisation of the Arctic to defend its geopolitical and resource interests.

Moscow symbolically claimed the North Pole as Russian territory in August 2007 during the third International Polar Year. Parliamentarian and explorer Artur Chilingarov piloted a bathysphere to plant a Russian flag at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, a publicity stunt later celebrated by President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. Putin has long believed in the importance of resource exploitation to build a strong state, as he argued in a master’s thesis published in 1998.

Arctic resources and land mass regions are crucial to the eight nations which claim its 14 million km². Russia controls one-quarter of the total, just behind Canada. Roughly one-fifth of the Russian landmass is north of the Arctic Circle. Nearly twenty years after Russia submitted documentation to extend its claims into the Arctic by a further 1.7 million km², the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf recently approved most of Russia’s claims to seabed rights in the central Arctic Ocean. These territories comprise 35,700 billion cubic metres of natural gas and over 2,300 million metric tonnes of oil and condensate; copper, nickel, platinum and other rare metals; fisheries (herring, flounder, perch, cod, seals, whales, walrus, king crabs and kelp). Together, these contribute 11 per cent of Russian national income and 22 per cent of Russian exports. Moscow has transformed the Arctic into a zone of confrontation with the Arctic Council countries: Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, the US, and Sweden and Finland, newly members of NATO.

Russia’s 21^st-century Arctic designs, and its investments in oil and gas fields, bombers and missiles, and icebreakers and reactors, reflect surprising continuities with Soviet policies. Russian leaders have pursued Arctic settlement and militarisation since the 1920s. Fear of attack over the North Pole was ingrained in Russian thought during the First World War in 1918 when Allied Troops intervened through Murmansk and Arkhangelsk to expand the battle against the Central Powers. Lenin sent not only researchers to northern latitudes, but troops. Stalin continued to flood Arctic regions with political commissars, NKVD operatives, and gulag prisoners. Brave explorers set off on rudimentary ‘drift stations’ affixed to ice flows to study Arctic weather, currents and geophysics. Especially after the Second World War, and until the collapse of the USSR, the Soviets occupied the Far North with ever-more sophisticated drift stations that contributed to a sense of Russian ownership of the region.

The Stalinist programme also involved the subjugation of indigenous groups to the Communist Party, many of them reindeer herders. Party leaders came to view indigenous peoples not only as backward but as hostile to Soviet power. They forced them into collective farms, destroying traditional institutions of reindeer husbandry. Relying heavily on gulag labour, the Soviets remade the tundra and taiga. They laid rails and roads northward from Kotlas to Vorkuta and Norilsk. They opened mines, smelters and forestry operations, all with labour supplied by poorly dressed and fed prisoners, thousands of whom perished. Eventually, wells and pipelines appeared, especially from the 1960s onwards. Many of Russia’s canals, power stations, refineries, roads and railway lines find their origins in the gulag.

Putin’s Arctic designs build on these achievements of Soviet power: heavily subsidised cities and enterprises dedicated to mining and smelting or resource extraction. With the collapse of the USSR, the end of state subsidies, and outmigration of polar residents (and in particular the male working age population), shift work has become more widespread in petrochemical and other extractive industries. The result is significant labour shortfalls. It should be no surprise that the Putin administration, like Stalin’s before it, has again begun using convict labour in Arctic regions.

Even before the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin had announced increasingly bellicose Russian policies towards the Arctic. The military manifestations included the creation of special motorised Arctic units and the refurbishment and expansion of military bases. By 2015, the Ministry of Defence had announced plans for six new bases on islands in the Northern Arctic. One such facility, the Nagurskoe Air Force Base, was established in 1947 for long range bombers. Putin’s air force built new concrete airstrips up to 3,500m in length to support a fleet of MiG-31 interceptors and Su-34 attack aircraft. Nuclear weapons stand ready, too: in 2024, the head of the Novaia Zemlia nuclear test site, Admiral Andrei Sinitsyn, claimed that ‘we are prepared at a moment’s notice’ to resume nuclear weapons tests.

A major goal of the military effort is to keep the Northern Sea Route (NSR) open year round. The NSR has been a dream of Russian explorers, entrepreneurs and leaders for decades, not the least through the efforts of Stalin’s Glavsevmorput agency. In the 21^st-century, Russia’s nuclear ministry, Rosatom, has put on Glavsevmorput’s felt boots. The self-aggrandising Rosatom has deployed nuclear-powered third generation icebreakers, small modular reactors (SMRs) and a floating power station, the ‘Academic Lomonosov’, moored in Pevek. Most of these nuclear systems are of Soviet design and heritage.

Russia’s nuclear establishment has long cherished its role as protector of the Arctic. In the 1950s, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb project, Igor Kurchatov, pushed Arctic nuclear applications. The Soviets built two nuclear power stations north of the Arctic Circle. His engineers developed SMRs designed to be deployed by parachute and assembled on site. Kurchatov’s dream of an SMR may be realised in 2028 in Yakutia. The nuclearisation of the Artic is being completed with the launch of a fleet of third generation Project 22220 nuclear icebreakers designed to break through ice up to 2.8 metres thick. Some engineers have shared dreams of deployment of submersible nuclear LNG tankers or nuclear ocean drilling platforms. These projects are all significantly over cost and behind schedule but have already made the Russian Arctic ‘the most nuclearised waters on the planet’.

The decision to control and exploit the Arctic should come with responsibilities to local people and the environment. But the Putin administration has largely followed Soviet development practices that have left scars on the tundra. Indigenous people have been pushed aside with the usual social and health costs. Their reindeer migration routes have been interrupted by pipelines. Their lands are covered with petrochemical sheen.

Nuclear waste comprises the most long-lived pollution in Arctic regions. Soviet Russian Arctic radioactive waste includes 17,000 containers of radioactive waste, 19 ships containing radioactive waste and 14 nuclear reactors (including five that still contain spent nuclear fuel). Shipyards and naval bases across the Arctic Circle hold tens of thousands of fuel assemblies, thousands of cubic metres of liquid and solid radioactive waste, submarine reactors, spent fuel and other types of waste. At least five submarines have been sunk in the Arctic Ocean. On top of this comes extensive radioactive fallout from 93 Arctic nuclear weapons tests at the Novaia Zemlia polygon and on the Kola Peninsula.

Putin declared 2017 the ‘year of the environment’ and has publicly ordered a clean-up of industrial and military residues and waste. But resource extraction and military advance are the primary state goals, and the clean-up budgets are miniscule. Petrochemical pollution continues to spread across the Arctic. Novatek, Lukoil, Gazprom and other companies work with state agencies to avoid environmental, health and safety inspections. High concentrations of nitrogen, carbon, chlorine and phenol exceed maximum allowable levels by five times in such extractive cities as Nikel, Monchegorsk, Apatity, Norilsk, and Medvezhegorsk. A variety of technogenic phenomena have particularly grave impacts on the health of indigenous ethnic groups.

And these impacts are accelerating, as Putin embraces Stalinesque projects to tame Arctic bounty. Where Stalin failed to open a naval base with prison labour in the Ob River delta at the terminus of a new gulag railway line, Putin opened the modern ‘Arctic Gates’ gas terminal at Cape Kammeny by video link from the Kremlin in May 2016. While Stalin’s great Polar railway line was abandoned six weeks after his death in 1953 – and after the loss of 50,000 prisoners in its construction – Putin has endorsed the construction of a new Arctic line to finish Stalin’s work.

All in all, Russian political, petrochemical and military leaders have turned the Arctic into a military zone. Like their Chinese naval counterparts in the South China Sea who attack Filipino fishers, Russian naval vessels have harassed Norwegian fishing boats. Its bombers stand ready. Its Novaia Zemlia nuclear polygon is prepared to test nuclear weapons. Even as it wages war in Ukraine, Russia expands its arsenal in the Northern Fleet and deploys nuclear submarines, radar stations, airfields and missile facilities. It prepares for conflict, certain that NATO has designs on its Arctic patrimony. Foreign Minister Lavrov’s warning that Russia is prepared for war in the Arctic must be taken very seriously indeed.