The Dark Side of NATO Expansion – Part II

Russia’s Zapolyarnoye natural gas field on the Gydan Peninsula in 2016. Photo: Gazprom

The Arctic Institute NATO Series 2024-2025

Ironically, even as Russia embarked on its expansionist war, Moscow remained committed at the outset of its 2021-2023 term as rotating AC chair to cooperation with its circumpolar neighbors, regardless of their alliance membership. That Russia could and would continue nurturing a collaborative Arctic even as it engaged in regional conflicts as far afield as Syria and Ukraine (with only one brief interruption, when in 2014 the US and Canadian AC representatives boycotted a Moscow meeting in protest), was the conventional wisdom by both the Council’s member States and its Indigenous Permanent Participants from 1996-2022.

Russia still represents fully half of the circumpolar world and isolating it from Arctic cooperation punishes more than Moscow: it puts at risk the very foundation of Arctic cooperation and the region’s stability. Governing the Arctic effectively, and peacefully, and sustaining multilateral commitment to protecting the Arctic environment and mitigating the collective dangers of climate change, continued to require Russia’s participation to succeed.

Arctic Indigenous peoples recognized this from the very outset of the war. As Edward Alexander, Co-Chair of Gwich’in Council International (GCI), a Permanent Participant of the AC, observed: “There is no military solution to the problems in the north. We want diplomatic solutions. We do not fight with our friends to solve problems. We talk and makes compromises.” While leaders of the A7 emphasize Russia’s gathering threat to the West, Arctic Indigenous leaders convey their empathy for Russia’s Indigenous peoples; Chief Gary Harrison of the Arctic Athabaskan Council (AAC), a fellow Permanent Participant organization on the Council, said he was “deeply concerned about the indigenous population of Russia, who lives behind the new iron curtain. ‘Almost all of us have people in the Russian Arctic. We need to know how they are doing. For example, have we heard that the Russian authorities make indigenous people join the military, and this worries us.’” Re-engaging across the Arctic’s borders, as so strongly desired by the Permanent Participants of the Council, remained ever more essential, even when no longer universally popular among the Council’s member States.

The Long-Road Back: Rebuilding Inclusive Multilateral/Multilevel Arctic Cooperation

Restoring Russian and Indigenous engagement – as Norway incrementally did under its term as rotating chair of the Arctic Council from the start of its term in 2023 through its end this year – amidst the ongoing war in Ukraine and the complex aftermath that will follow, will help ensure the Arctic remains the very zone of peace imagined by Gorbachev, whose passing at such a tumultuous time reminds us of the fragility of the Arctic peace we have long known.

Stepping back from these efforts to restore the Arctic’s prior inclusivity would jeopardize the very existence of the Council, but as the gavel was symbolically passed from Norway to Denmark last month under the leadership of Denmark’s new Arctic Ambassador, veteran Greenlandic diplomat Kenneth Hoegh, he presented a hopeful vision of unity among the Council’s State and Indigenous constituents, with “Indigenous Peoples and Communities in the Arctic” topping the list of “five priority areas” for Denmark’s chairship, and observing: “The work of the Arctic Council is important not only for the Arctic States, but also for the Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic, for us here in Greenland and for the Kingdom.”

While some scholars and diplomats have suggested that the Arctic Council may no longer be viable as presently configured, the Council has survived the collapse of consensus before, and on an issue of great importance – when the United States, during the first Trump presidency, broke ranks with its fellow Council members on the issue of climate change which had hitherto united the entire Council, both its member States and Permanent Participant organizations. As Evan Bloom prematurely argued six months into the Ukraine War, “Arctic exceptionalism was a mirage,” and America and its allies must now “search for other ways to promote Arctic cooperation.” In contrast to naysayers who prematurely proclaimed the death of Arctic exceptionalism, I believe the Arctic Council can unite the entire Arctic once again – but bold thinking reminiscent of Gorbachev’s and the ICC’s vision at the Cold War’s end is again required.

As War Continues, Risk of Escalation to the Arctic and Beyond Remains

Russia’s war has now entered its fourth year, devolving into a violent war of attrition that has brought destruction to both eastern Ukraine and western Russia, with each country eventually occupying the soil of its neighbor, and escalation beyond the current theater of war always possible – though thus far horizontal escalation beyond Ukraine’s and Russia’s borders has been avoided, even amidst substantial allied military support on both sides. Though in recent months, particularly since the return of President Trump to the White House in January, there has been a pronounced cooling in America’ support for Ukraine and instead a push to bring the warring parties to the peace table, which in turn constrains the risk the conflict will escalate beyond the present theater of war at this stage in the fight. Of particular concern regarding the war’s potential escalation was widespread news coverage this past winter of a significant deployment of North Korean troops, said to total 12,000, to aid Russia in its defense of the embattled Kursk region in February – an intervention predicated on the recent Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between Russia and the DPRK, signed in June 2024 and which came into effect this past December, and which was implemented after the surprise Ukrainian incursion on to Russian soil in August 2024.

The goal of the DPRK intervention was not further territorial conquest in Ukraine, but instead the expulsion of Ukrainian forces from Russia’s Kursk region (a goal that was achieved, but at reportedly staggeringly high casualties suffered by DPRK troops, which have since been withdrawn from the front lines). The intervention fell short of catalyzing a geographic expansion of the war, instead restoring stability to the battlespace, which has come to more resemble the static trench lines of World War I than the dynamic battles of maneuver of World War II. But it raised concerns that a war over territory in Eastern Europe could escalate to engulf distant regions as far from the front lines as Russia’s Arctic and Far East. While shrouded in both controversy and mystery, Russia acknowledged North Korea’s contribution to its war effort on April 26, 2025, when Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, “commended the role of North Korean fighters in the liberation of the Kursk Region. ‘I want specially to note the participation of servicemen of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in liberating border areas of the Kursk Region who in accordance with the Treaty on the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between our countries rendered considerable assistance in crushing the Ukrainian army’s combat group that had launched an incursion,’ Gerasimov said.” Two days later, North Korea also acknowledged its intervention, as reported by North Korean news service, KCNA: “WPK Central Committee Highly Praises Combat Sub-units of Armed Forces of DPRK for Performing Heroic Feats in Operations to Liberate Kursk Area of Russian Federation.” This was discussed the next day in the 38 North blog, published by The Henry L. Stimson Center: “North Korea’s Acknowledgement of War Participation.”

Representing the conventional view of DPRK’s intervention, consider Samuel Ramani’s February 19 analysis, “North Korea’s Military Intervention in Kursk: A High Casualty Learning Curve,” in 38 North. Ramani is an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), geopolitical risk consultant, and author of two Oxford University Press books on Russian foreign policy: Russia in Africa: Resurgent Great Power or Bellicose Pretender? (2023) and Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Quest for Global Counter-Revolution (2023). He is also a regular contributor to media outlets including Foreign Policy, BBC World Service, and CNN International, and frequently advises NATO governments on security issues relating to Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. Ramani writes: “On February 8, North Korea’s (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK) Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un issued his strongest statement of support yet for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By vowing to ‘invariably support and encourage the just cause of the Russian Army,’ Kim implicitly acknowledged North Korea’s direct participation in the Ukraine War. Kim’s comments followed warnings from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Russia-North Korea cooperation would continue to expand and reports that a second wave of North Korean force deployments to Russia’s Kursk region was imminent. While it appears as if North Korea is staying the course, its military performance thus far should give it room for pause. During the first three months after their arrival in October 2024, North Korea lost 40 percent of its 11,000-strong force contingent. An estimated 1,000 of those troops perished while 3,000 more were too severely injured to continue fighting. Presumably due to these staggering rates of attrition and urgent needs for additional training, North Korean troops were noticeably absent in Kursk in mid-January.”

A contrarian viewpoint – one largely overlooked by both mainstream media and major strategic studies and defense organizations – has been presented by Ted Snider in his February 5, 2025 article, “North Korean soldiers in Russia: Were they ever there? Their reported sudden departure last week raises a lot of questions,” on the Responsible Statecraft blog published by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Snider is a regular columnist on Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. In his article, Snider observes that: “The reported number of North Korean troops in the Kursk region before they reportedly left late last month has been steadily inflated, finally ballooning to 12,000. But aside from photos of captured soldiers the Ukrainian government has claimed are proof, witnesses appear scarce.” He suggests the deployment may be nothing more than a propaganda campaign to justify American permission to strike deeper into Russian territory using long-range ATACMS: “So, that rabbit – if it is a rabbit – can be pulled out of the hat again if needed. If North Korean troops really were in Kursk, and they really were wasted and decimated, then their presence didn’t justify the escalatory risk of granting permission to Ukraine to fire U.S. supplied long-range missiles deeper into Russian territory. If they really weren’t, then the whole affair was a sleight of hand to justify that decision.” While intriguing, the limited acceptance of this contrarian theory and the eventual acknowledgement by all major stakeholders on both sides of the conflict despite the risks inherent in the intervention and the embarrassing losses experienced by the DPRK has left the conventional wisdom largely unscathed – and with it, the specter of a regional war in Europe escalating horizontally to engulf not only the distant Russian Arctic and Far East, but allied nations in those regions whose fates are increasingly tied to the outcome of this conflict.

While the primary battlespace has not for the most part spread beyond the current theater of war, the war has nonetheless profoundly and adversely affected Indigenous Peoples and communities of Russia’s vast Arctic far from the battlefields in eastern Ukraine and southwestern Russia. As discussed in detail above, Indigenous Peoples in Russia have found themselves disproportionately recruited to fight on the frontlines even as Moscow has endeavored to protect Russian conscripts from such dangers, emptying northern villages of fighting-age men and leaving its own Arctic peoples in great distress and under intense pressure to support the war, or to go into exile or underground if they don’t.

Ukraine, in its efforts to reduce the offensive threat posed by Russia, has launched drone attacks against Russia as far north as the Olenya air base on the Kola Peninsula, just 92 km south of Murmansk and 2,676 km from the Ukraine border, and has bombed rail lines in the Russian Far East used for ferrying troops and war material, targeting the Severomuysky Tunnel and the nearby Chertov Most (Devil’s Bridge) in northwestern Buryatia on the Baikal Amur Mainline (BAM), just north of Mongolia and over 5,883 km from the Russia-Ukraine border – bringing war into the Arctic region for the first time since World War II, and risking further instability in both the Nordic and Northeast Asia regions. As improbable as it may have seemed in 2022, the ingredients for an escalation to expand the war to the Arctic region are now in place. NATO’s alliance structure and famous commitment to collective defense brings the entire Nordic region a worrisome step closer to war, just as the Ukraine war finds its way to the very doorstep of the Nordic region in the Kola Peninsula.

Moreover, Arctic Indigenous peoples are caught in the middle of this cauldron of conflict, their homelands divided by what increasingly appears to be a new Arctic Cold War. Reconciliation in this environment will not be easy. But NATO is, first and foremost, an alliance of democracies bound by shared values and inclusive political cultures. At the same time, the Arctic NATO member States share their own, dark histories of colonization and Indigenous displacement, a tragedy of collective history of northward State expansion that has in recent decades been increasingly addressed – with much progress made (reflected in the emergence and empowerment of Arctic Indigenous organizations and their leaders, as illustrated by Governor General of Canada Mary Simon, who is a former ICC chair, and Denmark’s Arctic Ambassador and chair of the Arctic Council Kenneth Hoegh, who is a Greenlandic diplomat and former head of Greenland’s representation to the United States in Washington). Efforts to transcend this long history, empower marginalized voices, and build a cooperative and peaceful Arctic together, where Indigenous and State collaboratively govern, have been a great accomplishment since the last Cold War – providing the world with an alternative model for reconciliation overcoming deep asymmetries of power and traumas of history. What was achieved in the 1990s can (and many hope will) be achieved again – with renewed boldness of effort and inclusivity of vision across our long-open, but rapidly closing, Arctic borders.

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD, is a Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut (UConn), a Senior Fellow (Arctic Security) at the Institute of the North, and author of numerous books on Arctic geopolitics, including most recently Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Books, 2024).