Soldiers from France, Germany and other European countries have begun arriving in Greenland to help boost the Arctic island’s security after talks involving Denmark, Greenland and the United States highlighted “fundamental disagreement” between President Donald Trump’s administration and its European allies.
France has already sent 15 soldiers and Germany 13. Norway and Sweden are also participating.
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The mission has been described as a recognition-of-the-territory exercise with troops to plant the European Union’s flag on Greenland as a symbolic act.
“The first French military elements are already en route”, and “others will follow”, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday as French authorities said soldiers from the country’s mountain infantry unit were already in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital.
France said the two-day mission is a way to show that EU troops can be quickly deployed if needed.
Meanwhile, Germany’s Ministry of Defence said it was deploying a reconnaissance team of 13 personnel to Greenland on Thursday.
‘Sense of urgency’
Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler reported from Paris that there was a “sense of urgency” among European nations, “particularly after the US’s actions in Venezuela, a sense that when Donald Trump says something, he actually means it. And that is why we’ve seen a number of European countries sending troops,” she said.
Denmark announced its plans to increase its own military presence in Greenland on Wednesday as the Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers met with White House representatives in Washington, DC, to discuss Trump’s intentions to take over the semiautonomous Danish territory to tap its mineral resources amid rising Russian and Chinese interest.
(Al Jazeera)
But the two foreign ministers emerged from the meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance having made little progress in dissuading Washington from seeking to take over Greenland.
“We didn’t manage to change the American position,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told reporters. “It’s clear that the president has this wish of conquering over Greenland.”
His Greenlandic counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, called for cooperation with the US but said that does not mean the country wants to be “owned by the United States”.
The pair announced their intent to establish a working group to continue to address concerns about control over Greenland and security in the Arctic.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters in Washington after the meeting that the military missions to Greenland by Denmark’s European allies would likely not make a difference to President Trump’s plans for the territory.
“I don’t think troops in Europe impact the president’s decision-making process, nor does it impact his goal of the acquisition of Greenland at all,” Leavitt said.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday that “we really need it [Greenland]”.
“If we don’t go in, Russia is going to go in, and China is going to go in. And there’s not a thing Denmark can do about it, but we can do everything about it,” Trump said.
Reporting from Greenland’s capital Nuuk, Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands said that Denmark has two aims. “One of them is to convince Donald Trump that Denmark can and will take Arctic defence seriously. Donald Trump is doing very scathing about Denmark’s capabilities for doing so, saying that Denmark’s forces here amounted to dog sleds,” he said.
“But also, there is an element … of deterrence in all of this,” he continued. “No one is thinking that any of the troops here could stop a US invasion if that happened, but it would make it more complicated, because these are now NATO allies who are coming here with their military personnel.”
“And that’s a strange thought, isn’t it? That’s in this day and age, a group of NATO countries is considering deterrence against in the United States itself,” he added.
Russia’s reaction
On Thursday, Moscow criticised “references to certain activity of Russia and China around Greenland as a reason for the current escalation”.
“First they came up with the idea that there were some aggressors, and then that they were ready to protect someone from these aggressors,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said of the West’s actions on Greenland.
The current situation, she said, “demonstrates with particular acuteness the inconsistency of the so-called ‘rules-based world order’ being built by the West”, she said.
“We stand in solidarity with China’s position on the unacceptability of references to certain activity of Russia and China around Greenland as a reason for the current escalation,” Zakharova said.
In Moscow, Al Jazeera’s Yulia Shapovalova reported that Russian ambassador to Belgium Denis Gonchar had blamed NATO for “militarisation of the Arctic”, stating that the arrival of the alliance’s personnel was a matter of serious concern. “In his opinion, Russia’s position is that the Arctic should remain a territory of peace and equal cooperation,” she said.
Fear in Inuit communities
The prospect of the US descending on Greenland to tap its minerals has struck fear into Inuit communities around the town of Ilulissat, perched beside an ice fjord on the western side of the island.
Before Wednesday’s meeting, Inuit Greenlander Karl Sandgreen, head of the Ilulissat Icefjord visitor centre, told Al Jazeera: “My hope is that Rubio is going to have some humanity in that talk.”
His fears are for the Inuit way of life.
“We are totally different. We are Inuit, and we’ve been living here for thousands of years,” he said. “This is my daughter’s and my son’s future, not a future for people who are thinking about resources.”