Image © U.S. Navy (Ice Camp Sargo, located in the Arctic Circle, serves as the main stage for Ice Exercise (ICEX))
It used to be thought that somehow or another the Arctic was unlike anywhere else. It was a haven for scientific research, the eight Arctic Nations (including both Russia and America) peacefully cooperating. All of that has been destroyed in recent years by the fast-retreating Arctic ice, the opening up of all sorts of commercial activities as a result; by the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and by increasing Chinese interest in the ‘Polar Silk Road’.
The opening up of the Northern Sea Route, which will allow commercial vessels to transit the shortest route from Pacific to Atlantic, looks likely to be a reality within a decade. Half of the world’s oil and gas reserves lie under the Arctic; as are a good per centage of those rare earths and critical minerals which are integral parts of every computer, every mobile phone, every battery-operated car. Despite a current ‘moratorium’ on fishing in the High Arctic, legitimate questions can be asked about how binding or long-lasting that would be if vast new fisheries are exposed; and tourism looks set to expand at a rapid rate, with all kinds of environmental and sea passage complications as a result. All of that brings with it growing inter-Arctic tensions about the ownership of the ice and rights of transit passage through it. And history demonstrates that where there are economic opportunities of this kind, diplomatic and military tensions will inevitably follow.
President Trump’s Greenlandic ambitions are a (only slightly laughable) symptom of what I mean.
“Owning Greenland is vital for US security… and economic security… It’s an absolute necessity and I cannot assure you that we would not use military or economic coercion”
The last remaining umbilical cord attaching Greenland to Mother Denmark is the annual block grant of 3.9bn kroner (around $560m) which amounts to roughly 19% of Greenland's GDP. That is, however, rather less than the US currently spend on the town of El Paso, Texas (!), and of course it pales into insignificance beside the mineral wealth which Greenland could increasingly own post-independence and in partnership with a deep pocketed USA.
China too is showing a keen interest in Greenland having recently sought to make enormous investments – a deep seaport and two international airports have been discussed – which would require huge capital investment. Hardly surprisingly Denmark and the US together prevented any such geopolitically catastrophic development.
There are two reasons why the great powers would want to own Greenland.
Firstly, both Trump and the Chinese are slaveringly eyeing up Greenland’s rich natural resources. China’s near worldwide monopoly on fifty ‘critical minerals’ is challenged by Greenland who can provide thirty of them from their two largest rare earth mines in the world. However, with a population of just 57,000 people, many of them Inuit fishermen and hunters, they currently lack the capabilities and industrial infrastructure needed to extract those resources. China and America would be equally keen to provide that expertise and investment.
The second is strategic. As the ice on Greenland progressively melts (it loses 270 billion tonnes a year, or 30 million tonnes an hour), the world is slowly coming to realise the strategically important positioning of this, the largest non-Continental island in the world. Greenland in a geographic sense commands the North Atlantic. It marks the top end of the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, which the US and NATO alike patrol carefully for Russian submarines, and which was so crucial in the resupply of Europe during the Second World War. Greenland is a crucial part of the US airspace and their ‘Pituffik Space Base,’ in the far North is a critical defence against any ICBM attack from the Kola Peninsula.
So Greenland’s strategic and economic importance to the US is clear; and they are (perfectly reasonably) determined that no other great power should come close to controlling it. More importantly, it is but one tiny symptom of the economic, diplomatic, and military tensions, particularly between Russia and NATO which will inevitably follow the retreat of the ice.
As Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov told the press in September 2024, “Russia is fully ready for a conflict with NATO in the Arctic. We see NATO stepping up drills related to possible crises in the Arctic.” The Russian Northern Fleet spokesman said of recent military exercises: “Current deployments are to rehearse repelling military threats and ensure the security of sea lanes and Russia’s areas of maritime economic activity in the northern seas in the event of a crisis.” Or again, Russian defence minister Sergei Shoygu explained the Northern fleet’s strategic submarine base at Gadzhiyevo which is roughly 100 miles from the Finnish border: “Given NATO’s desire to build up military potential near Russia’s borders as well as to expand the Northern Atlantic Alliance at the expense of Sweden and Finland, retaliatory measures are required to create an appropriate grouping of troops in North West Russia.”
Most recently (in a speech on 27 March 2025 when he was in Murmansk to launch the latest Yasen-M nuclear-powered submarine Perm), President Putin himself said that “the United States will continue to advance its geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Arctic. Geopolitical competition and fighting for positions in this region are also escalating.” He expressed concerns “about the fact that NATO countries are increasingly often designating the Far North as a springboard for possible conflicts and are practicing the use of troops in these conditions. We will respond to all this.”
The sheer scale of Russia’s military deployments should perhaps not surprise us. The Kola Peninsula is home of their Nuclear and Electromagnetic arsenal. In the Baltic Sea sits their enclave of Kaliningrad - the most heavily militarised area per square foot in the world. Russian land forces in the Arctic were growing substantially at least until the invasion of Ukraine. They were proud of – and relatively open about – their plans to re-activate or build from scratch at enormous expense up to 100 bases along the Arctic coast from Murmansk to Wrangell Island.
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Aside from nuclear, the most important of all Russia’s Arctic military capabilities is her Northern Fleet – some 32 surface warships and more than 33 active submarines. They have at least seven nuclear-powered icebreakers and thirty diesel-powered ones, many of them armed with Kalibr Cruise missiles. An organisation which should be of particular concern to the West must be a shadowy body called GUGI. It claims to be a deep-sea research organisation, but it actually operates submarines specially adapted for deep diving to gather intelligence, maintain seabed installations, and carry out sabotage – especially of pipelines and cable networks. It has more than 50 ships, submarines and floating dry docks. Russian submarine activity up to the GIUK Gap has been reported as being “currently equalling or surpassing Cold War levels”, and a former deputy commander of NATO Maritime Forces Europe has described the situation as the ‘Fourth Battle of the Atlantic’.
For comparison, the deployable part of the Royal Navy – worldwide – consists of: 2 aircraft carriers, 6 destroyers, 8 frigates, and 9 submarines plus allied ships, although reportedly only about 20% of them are currently seaworthy. And none of them – so far as I am aware – are currently deployed anywhere near the Arctic.
There is another significant ‘side’ consequence for the Arctic coming from the war in Ukraine. For in the event of any kind of stalemate, or even worse of a possible Russian defeat, there must be a very real risk that Putin would use diversionary tactics elsewhere to test out our resolve. The Arctic may well be just such a testing ground.
It would probably not be a conventional escalation, which would risk an Article 5 reaction from NATO (or at least not yet). But if Russian military theology – as demonstrated for example in the Zapad series of exercises – were to be followed with any aggression in the High North, the first evidence would be cyber and intelligence operations. Then unidentified ‘men in green uniforms’ with no distinguishing badges or marks would engage in low level (unattributable) tactical operations – setting up apparently harmless camps in perhaps disputed territory.
Well, Russian (and Chinese) cyber aggression is already a regular feature; attacks on Critical National Infrastructure (like undersea cables) are becoming more frequent, as are attacks against personnel. There are regular snap military exercises, strategic bomber overflights and patrol activities, jamming of Global Navigation Satellite systems, and unidentified (and therefore unattributable) drone flights over Norway’s military and energy infrastructure. In November 2022 the Admiral Vladimirsky was spotted loitering near the RAF’s maritime patrol base at Lossiemouth. In Spring 2023, 50 Russian trawlers, research vessels and merchant ships were reported to be collecting data along the seabed and monitoring military and other sensitive information. And on Christmas Day 2024 the Estlink 2 power cable between Finland and Estonia was cut and four telecoms cables were damaged, allegedly by the Russian ‘dark fleet’ tanker Eagle S maliciously dragging her anchor. She was arrested by the Finnish authorities.
Giving evidence to the House of Lords enquiry into the Arctic in 2023, the Director- General of MI5 said that “agents of Russia’s military intelligence agency are conducting arson attacks, sabotage and other dangerous actions with increasing recklessness.” And Lord Houghton, former Chief of Defence Staff, pointed out that Russia’s relative weakness by comparison with NATO in conventional warfare terms, very much increases the likelihood that they will use “even more damaging malevolent activity below the threshold of formalised warfare.“
Some kind of Russian military adventurism is another real possibility, for example, in Spitzbergen. The 1920 Svalbard Treaty prohibits the use of the islands for ‘warlike purposes’. Nonetheless, in April 2016 Chechen special forces instructors landed in Svalbard before holding a parachute exercise over the polar ice cap, and the Russian Zapad 2017 exercise included a simulated amphibious assault. There are two ready-made Russian bases: Pyramiden and Barentsburg. I have visited both, and Pyramiden in particular looks very much like any military base – barrack blocks, a parade square, huge gym and swimming pool, even a chapel, all around a statue of Lenin. Troops could move in tomorrow, perhaps masquerading as ‘maintenance troops’ (akin to the ‘scrap metal merchants’ who sparked off the Falklands War by occupying South Georgia). So Svalbard could well be a fairly obvious military flashpoint.
NATO simply cannot continue to ignore the massive and growing Russian military presence in the Arctic and keep up the forlorn hope of the Arctic being an area of low tension, of scientific cooperation, a peaceful wilderness. The prospect of Russian power being projected from the High North into the North Atlantic is very real and a comprehensive strategy is needed to meet the threat. Yet the Arctic did not feature at all in UK defence and security policy documents until very recently. The 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review made no mention of the region at all; by 2015 there was an oblique reference to the Arctic warfare capability of the Royal Marines but again no mention in 2018’s National Security Capability Review.
The UK Armed Forces have, as a result, few dedicated capabilities for Arctic operations. The RAF’s fleet of maritime patrol aircraft may be insufficient to maintain a constant presence in the High North alongside any long-term presence in the Indo-pacific and the protection of the nuclear deterrent. The Royal Navy has one (at 25 years rather aging) ice patrol ship, HMS Protector, but she spends most of her time in the South Atlantic and Antarctic. The Royal Navy’s ability to patrol and conduct surveillance operations under the Arctic ice has gone and now looks unaffordable.
We can, it is true, make one important contribution to under-ice surveillance in the form of autonomous submarines. The £15.4m Cetus designed and built specially for the Royal Navy by Plymouth-based tech firm MSubs can fit inside a shipping container and be transported around the world to wherever the Fleet needs it.
It is also laudable that the Royal Marines have uniquely preserved their cold weather warfare skills through their Mountain Leader Cadre, a group of highly trained instructors and specialists with expertise in mountain and cold weather warfare. Every year units from 3 Commando Brigade lead a series of exercises in Northern Norway to maintain that cold weather specialism, training marines to survive, move and fight in extreme weather conditions. When I visited the exercise, I was pleased and amused to see our Royal Marines training the US Corps of Marines. The winter warfare capability of the USMC lapsed over the years the Corps was heavily engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan and other generally hot weather climates. I mentioned this to the US Colonel there who confided in me that the US Marine Corps has such a high turnover of personnel that they lose specialist skills like arctic weather training which they then have to relearn from us.
As well as the invaluable training which these exercises provide, they are also an important part of our reinforcement of the Northern Flank in Norway. It has taken 10 or 15 years of badgering, but NATO have relatively recently revised their stance over the High North (Atlantic and Arctic). They now accept that it is an area of increasing strategic importance and seems likely to become a theatre of ‘assertive naval diplomacy’. Their most visible response is perhaps the bi-annual Exercise Nordic Response, the most recent of which (in 2024) saw over 20,000 troops from 13 nations practice their Arctic warfare techniques and strategy. The mutual assurance offered by the NATO Treaty now covers all of the Arctic and Nordic states (bar, of course, Russia). Iceland is the only member who has no troops, air force nor navy, but whose contribution is the strategically vital airbase at Keflavik near Reykjavik, which houses inter alia US and British P8 submarine reconnaissance aircraft – so vital to watch over the crucially important Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap.
The other major player worthy of strategic consideration in the Arctic is, of course, China, who are without doubt determined to be more than an observer. They have a sharply increasing commercial presence in the region, including substantial investment in mining operations in Greenland and in gas projects on Russia’s northern Arctic coast. China has built docks, railway lines and infrastructure in key Arctic ports, including on the Yamal Oil and gas terminals. China’s first most recent Arctic policy document in January 2018, entitled ‘China’s Arctic Policy by The State Council Information Office of the PRC’, declares their intention,
“to work with the international community to safeguard and promote peace and stability in, and the sustainable development of, the Arctic.”
“[as a] ‘near Arctic state, and a member of the UN Security Council, China shoulders the important mission of jointly promoting peace and security in the Arctic.”
To do that,
“China will bring opportunities for parties concerned to jointly build a ‘Polar Silk Road’ and facilitate connectivity and sustainable economic and social development of the Arctic.”
Despite their protestations to the contrary, China are now rapidly developing their Arctic capabilities. They have at least five icebreakers: Ji Di, Tan Suo San, Xue Long 1, Xue Long 2 and Hao, and may well be developing more. Three of them were deployed in the Arctic in late 2024.
The US Department of Defence produced a report in early 2025 expressing (surprisingly muted) concerns about Chinese military activity in the Arctic.
“In the decade since gaining observer status on the Arctic Council in 2013 China has massively expanded its Arctic footprint and has begun to work closely with Russia in its attempt to be seen as an Arctic power.
“The PRC’s expanding Arctic engagement has created new opportunities for engagement between the PRC and Russia and has resulted in unprecedented styles of collaboration.”
The DoD report lists a number of joint Russian-Chinese military activities in the Arctic. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) sent a small naval flotilla into the Bering Sea between Russia and Alaska for the first time in 2015, and made visits to Denmark, Finland and Sweden around the same time. In September 2022 they conducted a combined naval patrol in the Bering Sea. China’s coastguard entered the Arctic for the first time in 2023 in a joint patrol with Russia, and in Summer 2024 several month-long combined operations including bomber, naval, and coast guard patrols in the Alaskan ‘Air Defence Identification Zone’ jointly with Russian assets. In themselves, these are not enormously significant, but they do point to an increasing interest in the Arctic and deepening cooperation with Russia.
China will in the years to come without doubt further develop their Arctic military capabilities. I have it on good authority that they are planning to have a nuclear (propelled and armed) submarine with under-ice capabilities within 5 years. That must surely send a cold shiver down all of our spines.
China’s policy on the status of territorial waters and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea might well have a read-across to freedom of navigation questions in the Northern Sea Route. Will China really kow-tow to the Duma’s declaration that all vessels through the Northern Sea Route must have Russian permits, a Russian pilot and pay a hefty fee for the privilege? I think not.
In other words, even if – for now – Beijing is ostensibly Moscow's 'strategic partner' in the area, that cannot last beyond whatever the endgame in Ukraine may be. China is by far the dominant partner in what is starting to look like rather an uneasy partnership. Russia is looking increasingly worried about China's operations in the Arctic, and their military and commercial activity is starting to look to be in direct proportion to one another.
The longer-term strategic conundrum must be whether a China/Russia alliance in the Arctic is possible and sustainable, in which case what would be the consequences for the west? Or on the other hand, what would happen if their interests diverged or clashed? They are great rivals for energy, as well as allies. Russia and China are neighbours with a tortured history. The Chinese-Russian border is the sixth longest in the world and one of the least settled. Several times in recent history, Russia ceded some land – mostly uninhabited islands – to China, but there are long running tensions over Chinese colonisation north of the Amur River, and with regard to Outer Manchuria. Those tensions may well make any possible Sino/Russian alliance in the Arctic less likely.
The general re-militarisation of the Arctic by both Russia, potentially China, and by NATO can be well justified in terms of self-defence, strategic positioning against anticipated future changes (commercial opportunities); and may well constitute a modern form of the cold war theology of Mutually Assured Destruction, which deterred either side from firing the first shot in any potential nuclear exchange. Arctic rearmament may similarly be thought of as a kind of deterrence.
Remilitarisation is a self-fulfilling prophesy. “We know what you are up to and what assets you hold in the Arctic and Atlantic; we understand your ‘bastion’ concept with regard to the North Atlantic; and we can monitor/deter your shipping and submarines in the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap (GIUK).”
All of that is fine. I have always rather believed in the concept encapsulated in the motto of my own old Regiment, the Honourable Artillery Company; “Arma Pacis Fulcra” – Arms are the Balance of Peace. So the build-up of military capabilities in the Arctic need not of itself herald military action or confrontation. Indeed, you could well argue that roughly equal military capabilities actually reduces military tensions and the likelihood of war rather than increasing it. Putin, for example, has demonstrated time and again that he takes advantage of perceived weakness (Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine); but that he treats strength warily (NATO as a whole, Poland, the Baltic states in particular) which he has – at least so far – left strictly alone.
But that must not be an excuse for complacency or for disarming. It must be a spur to increasing military strength so that Russia can be in no doubt what would happen if they stepped out of line. Had NATO acted more decisively in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea, most observers would agree that the current war in Ukraine could have been avoided. Military indecision or inactivity in the Arctic could well have a similar outcome in the years to come.
In the famous words of Frederick the Great, “Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.”
