Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, there’s been a tectonic shift in Arctic diplomacy and security, resulting in the March 2022 diplomatic boycott of the Arctic Council (AC) under Russia’s term as rotating chair (2021-23), followed by the rapid pivot by Finland and Sweden from long-established policies of neutrality to formal NATO membership.1) With this sudden end of Finland’s and Sweden’s historic neutrality, so critical in many ways to the openness and cooperative dynamics of the Nordic Region hitherto bookended by Norway (a founding NATO member since 1949) and Russia (NATO’s principal opponent during Soviet times), a strengthening of alliance unity and military integration began emerging among the AC’s seven democratic member States (the “Arctic 7” or “A7”), with Russia – whose northernmost territories represent half the Arctic region, and whose Arctic economy and population exceed all other AC member States combined – left out.2) This concurrent strengthening of unity within the A7, expansion of NATO to include all seven of its members, and consequent exclusion of Russia greatly strained the preceding climate of circumpolar Arctic cooperation dating back to the end of the Cold War that had given rise to the phenomenon known to many as “Arctic Exceptionalism,” undermining Russia’s turn as rotating chair of the Council, putting most cooperative Arctic programs spanning the old East-West divide into a deep freeze that risked many of the gains achieved since the 1991 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) brought East and West together across the circumpolar North.3)
Indeed, this in turn precipitated a hardening of borders through military deployments and fortifications, erecting a new ‘Ice Curtain’ across the Arctic that is no less divisive than the ‘Iron Curtain’ erected at the start of the last Cold War which physically partitioned Europe between competing military-political blocs. Pan-Arctic collaboration between the East and West was famously called for by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (who passed away six months after the 2022 Ukraine war began) in his famed 1987 Murmansk Speech. Gorbachev offered the world an off-ramp for ending the Cold War (he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize three years later for boldly and successfully easing East-West tensions), aligning contemporaneously with the inclusive vision put forth by the Inuit Circumpolar Council.4) This collaborative vision is widely shared by other Arctic Indigenous organizations that joined the ICC in partnership with the Arctic States to form the 1991 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS), the precursor to the AC – guiding the region toward a stable and cooperative post-Cold War era with a shared vision of collaborative Arctic governance.5) This State-Tribe partnership was united by a multilevel commitment to collaboration at the local, tribal, regional, national and transnational levels that held strong from the 1991 establishment of the AEPS through to the 25th anniversary year of the Arctic Council in 2021, but when Russia invaded Ukraine the next year, this multilevel consensus would shatter under new pressures of war, quickly catalyzing NATO’s expansion across the Nordic Region.
NATO’s Nordic expansion was portrayed as a win by the West and a necessary step to protect the Arctic from a newly menacing and expansionist Russia. While NATO’s expansion was catalyzed by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, tensions between Russia and the West in the Arctic had already been on the rise since at least 2014 when its resurgence became evident, most dramatically with the annexation of Crimea and hybrid invasion of eastern Ukraine), and later reflected in updated Arctic policy statements and revised Arctic strategies in the West in the preceding years (as chronicled by Jen Evans).6)
Because Arctic cooperation is rooted not only in East-West multilateral cooperation, but also in North-South State-Indigenous cooperation, this new bifurcation into re-emergent Arctic blocs threatens the transnational and Indigenous unity of the Arctic, with multiple Indigenous homelands undergoing a de facto partitioning, reversing the gains achieved since the Cold War’s end.7) This has undermined the transnational unity of the Sami Council, whose member communities and regional organizations span the newly expanded Russia-NATO frontier8) as well as that of the ICC, whose member communities and regional organizations span the Russia-Alaska frontier, and who, like the Sami, find their homelands now in the crosshairs of an international struggle.9) The Aleut International Association is similarly divided, though like the ICC, most of its member communities are on the NATO side of the divide, but an outward flow of refugees since the war began across land borders between Russia and Finland and icy maritime borders between Siberia and Alaska indicates another potential vector of confrontation that could engulf the once isolated Arctic in an expanding armed conflict.
While the present hot war is largely confined to Eastern Europe, the risk of escalation beyond Ukraine is omnipresent, with Ukrainian forces having struck as far north as Olenya, just 92 km south of Murmansk and over 2,726 km from the Ukraine border, and as far east as Buryatia, over 5,883 km by road from Ukraine and just north of Mongolia – and the militaries of both sides expanding their activities in the Arctic region, with a rise in hybrid provocations by Russia in the Nordic region, and efforts by both Russia and its NATO-member neighbors to re-fortify the extended NATO/Russia military frontier that now runs from the Arctic to the Baltic and beyond. Indeed, more recent news reports indicate Ukraine has now extended its reach to Russia’s far eastern city of Vladivostok, home of its Pacific fleet 9,168 km by road from Ukraine.10)
As the Kyiv Independent reported: “Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR) was behind explosions near Desantnaya Bay in Russia’s Vladivostok on May 30, which reportedly damaged military personnel and equipment, a source in HUR told the Kyiv Independent. If confirmed, the Vladivostok operation would be Ukraine’s furthest incursion into Russian territory – approximately 6,800 kilometres from the Ukrainian border.”11) Note the distance calculated by the Kyiv Independent is measured in point-to-point air miles, but rail and road links across Russia bypassing the frontiers of Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China are much longer, over 9,000 km. Moreover, just two days later, the Kyiv Independent reported that Ukraine had successfully launched simultaneous drone strikes against Russia’s strategic bomber fleet dispersed far and wide across Russia, destroying over 40 aircraft at bases from as far afield as Ukrainka in Amur Oblast (7,708 km by road away) to Belaya near Irkutsk (5,275 km by road away) to Olenya (once again) near Murmansk (2,726 km away).12) Ukraine’s increasing capacity to strike distant Russian military targets as far away as the Russian Arctic and Far East has the potential to destabilize both the Nordic region as well as Northeast Asia, and bring war closer to remote Arctic Indigenous homelands.
Pressures on Arctic Indigenous leaders to support their countries in wartime have had something of a chilling effect on public expressions of criticism of the war effort and its impacts on pan-Arctic cooperation, primarily through increasing self-censorship by hitherto outspoken leaders, several who greeted news of the Arctic Council boycott in 2022 with surprise and concern.13) But in Russia, the risks have proven even graver than self-censorship – where exile, imprisonment and even the omnipresent threat of physical harm or assassination in a nation where assassination remains a tool used by the State to silence its opponents are a gathering risk to outspoken Indigenous and opposition leaders, and disproportionate deployments of remote, non-Russian ethnic peoples to the front lines have hollowed out numerous Arctic villages of fighting age men, with non-Russian military casualties disproportionately high and tragic losses of Indigenous men widely noted by western media and think tanks.14) Exiled Udege leader Pavel Sulyandziga, the outspoken founder and president of the Batani Foundation, an Indigenous rights organization, discussed his concerns while in exile of the long reach of Putin’s assassins with Novaya Gazeta’s Laura A. Henry – he fled Russia for the United States in 2017 after “numerous threats to Sulyandziga’s personal safety, as well as to his family members and colleagues, because of his political activism.”15)
Reports of disproportionate casualties among remote Indigenous communities are also worrisome and present a unique threat to the cultural survival of Russia’s Arctic Indigenous peoples. As Kennan Institute senior advisor Izabella Tabarovsky describes in the The Russia File blog on the Wilson Center website, “Russia’s recruitment of soldiers to fight its war in Ukraine has disproportionately drawn from the country’s Indigenous peoples. Individuals from these communities – most notably Buryats, Tuvans, Kalmyks, as well as members of small-numbered nations – have been recruited at above-average rates and experienced higher-than-average- combat death rates,” and “it is their specific ethnic communities that face the most long-lasting and potentially devastating consequences.”16) As Tabarovsky explains, “The smaller the Indigenous group, the higher the impact,” and “[f]or some communities, the stakes are existential.”17) Citing exiled Udege leader Pavel Sulyandziga, the “42 small-numbered Indigenous nations living in Siberia and the Russian Far East” are particularly vulnerable, as “7 have fewer than 1,000 members, 12 have fewer than 2,000, and none exceed 50,000. For these groups, every loss to recruitment – and certainly every combat death – poses a potential threat to the survival of the entire ethnos.”18) Andrew E. Kramer, in his September 26, 2022 discussion in the New York Times of how Russia’s draft has targeted ethnic and Indigenous minorities, writes that “Putin’s mobilization has disproportionately targeted far-flung regions of Russia and those with large populations of minority groups, including in Siberia and the predominantly Muslim provinces of the North Caucasus,” and that “ethnic minorities in Russia and occupied areas of Ukraine have been hit so disproportionately by the draft that it is clearly discriminatory, rights activists and Ukrainian officials say.”19)
The existential nature of this threat to Indigenous peoples of the Russian Arctic from the Yupik homeland in Russia’s eastern Arctic all the way to the Sami homeland in Russia’s western Arctic has caught the attention of worldwide media, with one article in the UK-based Metro ominously titled “The Indigenous People ‘Breathing Last Breath’ in Putin’s War 4,000 Miles from Home” and chronicling the war’s adverse impacts on Yupik communities in Russia’s Far East.20) Buryat scientist and co-founder of the Free Buryatia Foundation, Maria Vyushkova, has worked to verify claims of disproportionate Indigenous losses, as the Moscow Times has reported: “While Indigenous activists long sounded the alarm about the disproportionate mobilization of minorities for the war, Vyushkova was the first to back these claims up with hard data and shed light on the true scale of ethnic disparities in the confirmed Russian-side casualties.”21) The war has also had a severe impact on the Sami of Russia’s western Arctic, where Moscow’s concerns about border security and regional stability under dual pressures of the war’s mobilization and NATO’s expansion have led to a recent rise in persecution of the Sami. As described in The Guardian, “Sami people in Russia are being forced to hide their identity and live ‘outside the law’ for fear of imprisonment and persecution, leading figures from the community have warned,” after “Russia’s Ministry of Justice added 55 Indigenous organisations to a list of terrorists and extremists” late last year.22)
As Borders Harden, Arctic’s Exemplary Diversity of Transnational Viewpoints Diminishes
The Ukraine war has transformed both the practice of Arctic diplomacy and the conceptualization of Arctic security, which since the 1991 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) and its evolution in 1996 to the AC23) has been defined by its distinctive multilateral East-West (international) and multilevel North-South (Indigenous-State) cooperation. The resulting “mosaic of cooperation,” as famously described by Oran R. Young, has blessed the Arctic region with enduring stability rooted in this exceptional collaboration.24)
While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an affront to all people of conscience, it was not Russia that broke ranks with its Arctic partners on matters of cooperation – it was the West, in response to Russia’s aggression, without prior consultation with Arctic Indigenous peoples – thus threatening the very fabric of Arctic international cooperation. This re-emergent division of the Arctic into competing blocs risks silencing the plurality of voices that had hitherto defined the Arctic region and strengthened its multilateral and multilevel cooperation. Since Russia’s invasion there has been a hardening of Arctic security to focus predominantly upon the increasingly palpable military threat from Russia against its neighbors, not just in the Arctic region but along much of its periphery, superseding in urgency and thus upending the prior pillars of a more holistic Arctic security (environmental, human, cultural and Indigenous) that had remained prominent since the latter days of the Cold War, but seemed to become (in relative terms) largely forgotten as the Arctic began to be re-militarized at a frenetic pace (first in the Nordic region in the wake of the Ukraine War as NATO expanded, and more recently in Arctic North America amidst new intra-Arctic tensions between the United States and its Arctic neighbors Greenland and Canada.)
On March 3, 2022, the seven western Arctic countries (the A7) announced their historic boycott of AC participation in protest of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, after over 25 years of continuous operations since its inaugural meeting in Ottawa on September 19, 1996.25) The boycott (self-described as a “pause”) was one of many similar responses by numerous organizations around the world, part of a quickly-achieved consensus within the West to isolate Russia in protest for its aggression against its neighbor.
However, the boycott caught several of the Arctic Council’s Permanent Participant organizations representing the Indigenous peoples of the region by surprise, as they were not consulted – a break with the spirit and long tradition of the Council, which stands first among the world’s many intergovernmental forums for its efforts to unite State and Indigenous interests, and for elevating State-Tribe consultation to the highest of normative values.26) While unequal in their institutional power, with the eight founding member States (the A8) holding all of the formal power, the Permanent Participants are essential partners in the formation of the consensus that defines AC governance, and they have played a vital and important role in both the formation of the Council in 1996, and in its operations since. Indeed, the stability of the Arctic region owes much to the spirit of collaborative governance that aligns Indigenous and State interests, as reflected in the Council’s structure as well as other novel and innovative governing institutions across the circumpolar Arctic. While surprised, most of the Permanent Participants endorsed the decision made by the democratic Arctic States, but not all with the same level of enthusiasm and most expressing concern for the future of Arctic cooperation.27)
Only one of the Permanent Participants, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON), viewed increasingly as a mouthpiece for, and controlled by, Putin’s government in Moscow, came out in full support of Moscow’s “peacemaking” effort in Ukraine, though news media report that the Russian section of the Sami Council also publicly supported the invasion, albeit under enormous coercive pressures of the Russian State, which treats opposition to the war as treason, with the risk of arrest, detention, exile and assassination having a chilling effect on public opposition to the war.28) RAIPON’s support for Moscow’s military action outraged a network of exiled Indigenous leaders formerly associated with RAIPON, who in turn launched a competing organization, the International Committee on Indigenous Peoples of Russia (ICIPR) which issued its own counterstatement ten days later.29)
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).
The Dark Side of NATO Expansion – Part II