Partners, Not Petitioners: The Arctic's New International Map

BRICS and the Politics of “Polar Identity”#

Maria Lagutina, Professor at St. Petersburg State University and editor-in-chief of the journal Arctic 2035.

Maria Lagutina of St. Petersburg State University, editor-in-chief of the journal Arctic 2035, opened with a survey drawn from her team’s Russian Science Foundation project on the polar cooperation of the BRICS states.

BRICS polar engagement, formalized around 2015 under a science-and-technology working group, still leans on scientific and climate cooperation—politically neutral tracks that let states of very different “Arctic identity” all contribute. Lagutina ranked the ten members in tiers: Russia as the sole Arctic power; China and India as Arctic Council observers; Brazil and South Africa active mainly in science; and newer members—the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia—with uneven but real interest. The UAE she singled out as promising, backing the “three poles of cold” concept alongside Russia, India, and China.

For non-Arctic states, she argued, participation in Arctic affairs is partly about image—a marker of great-power or middle-power status on the world stage. Cooperation nonetheless remains anchored on Russia, with Russia–China as the backbone and Russia–India catching up; partners prefer dealing with Moscow directly, finding the ten-member format cumbersome. Secondary-sanctions risk continues to deter open Indian and Chinese participation in some projects.

Her recommendation: Russia should advance its own vision of Arctic cooperation in line with national interests, differentiate its approach across the BRICS sub-groups rather than treating them as a monolith, and draft a clear road map for working with non-Arctic states.

The Northern Sea Route between Beijing and Washington#

Pavel Devyatkin of HSE, the Arctic Institute, and the Quincy Institute in Washington.

Pavel Devyatkin (HSE, the Arctic Institute and the Quincy Institute in Washington) examined the Northern Sea Route through two external lenses—Chinese and American—within the framework of the “blue economy.”

The year 2025 brought new highs: 103 transit voyages, around 3 million tonnes of transit cargo, 14 China–Europe container runs (double 2023), and the first direct China–UK link, the Istanbul Bridge. Russia is investing—new Arktika-class icebreakers, port modernization, digital navigation—toward an official 150-million-tonne target by 2030.

Beijing’s rhetoric, however, outruns its actions. State media celebrate the route as the future, but Chinese economists note that it works on the map, not in the spreadsheet. Sanctions risk is the structural brake: major state oil firms paused Russian seaborne purchases after US measures, fearing secondary sanctions, and 90 percent of China’s trade still runs through Suez and Malacca. For Beijing, diversification via the Northern Sea Route is a desirable long-term option, not an urgent necessity.

The American view is geopolitical, not commercial. US analysts doubt the route’s commercial appeal, citing a four-to-five-month navigation window, environmental fragility, and disputes over Article 234 of UNCLOS—though Washington’s own failure to ratify UNCLOS weakens that legal critique.

Yet the US position is not uniformly hostile; some favor narrow cooperation on search-and-rescue, climate monitoring, and Alaska LNG. Disruption at Hormuz and in the Red Sea, Devyatkin argued, is the scenario in which the route gains maximum value—a long-term diversification tool rather than a quick crisis substitute. To make it more attractive, he urged cutting transaction costs through predictable tariffs and a shared Arctic insurance pool, turning strict environmental standards into a competitive advantage, and stabilizing transit through bilateral legal agreements.

Rare-Earth Metals as a New Arena for Cooperation#

Valery Konyshev (RANEPA Northwest Institute) introduced what he framed as a fresh direction for BRICS cooperation: rare-earth metals, the indispensable inputs for electronics, data centers, green energy, and defense.

Through export controls dating to 2020, and rules reaching any factory that uses Chinese metals, technology, or equipment, Beijing has built a powerful geopolitical lever—one it used to blunt Trump-era pressure, says Konyshev.

Beyond Greenland, a driver of US interest, Russia holds serious reserves—above all the Tomtor deposit, with the world’s richest ore at roughly 14.5 percent concentration. Russia plans a full-cycle processing cluster across Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Tuva, with players such as Rosatom, Rusal, and Nornickel positioned to expand. India, by contrast, holds vast monazite sands rich in rare earths and thorium but lacks processing technology, and China has undercut its domestic industry.

The conclusion then is the following: within BRICS, cooperation here is most realistic first between India and Russia, with other partners joining later—provided India takes a position sufficiently independent of Washington.

The Deepening India–Russia Relationship#

Raj Kumar Sharma of SGT University and visiting fellow at NatStrat, New Delhi.

Raj Kumar Sharma (SGT University; visiting fellow at NatStrat, New Delhi) traced the institutionalization of India–Russia Arctic ties since 2014—and highlighted the limits of these relations.

India frames its Arctic interest through climate, says Sharma: warming in the Arctic affects the seas around India, food, water, and migration security. He stressed India’s commitment to strategic autonomy and a multipolar Arctic—collaborating with Nordic states and Russia alike, while having no Arctic cooperation with the US.

A logistics-support agreement, science cooperation through the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research with Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, and the March 2026 India–Russia Arctic dialogue mark gradual institutionalization despite sanctions pressure.

Sharma argued that the India–Russia–China triangle can work only if Russia balances India and China; he saw little near-term prospect for a full trilateral, given India–China differences, but real value in Russia’s stabilizing role. Beyond hydrocarbons, he pointed to shipbuilding and ship repair, the North–South corridor, and even Indian pharmaceutical investment in the Russian Arctic as direct opportunities—and proposed that India use its BRICS presidency to connect the Global South to Arctic questions.

Public-Private Partnership, the Eurasian Way#

Andrey Naryshkin (MGIMO; adviser to the Eurasian Economic Commission) made the case for organizing Arctic public-private partnership at the level of the EAEU rather than any single state.

From the great polar expeditions to the Soviet Glavsevmorput, Arctic development has always required pooled financial and organizational resources, political will, and firm control over execution. Russia, he noted, has historically treated the Arctic not as a point to be flagged but as a line to be developed.

Naryshkin framed three goals for such partnership: infrastructure (terminals, weather stations, roads, airstrips, industrial development), social aims (decent living standards for Arctic residents), and environmental aims—citing the US “Project Iceworm” nuclear waste under Greenland as a cautionary tale.

The Union has delivered in delegated areas—free-trade agreements with Vietnam, Iran, and Serbia, an industrial-cooperation fund requiring multi-state participation, and a Eurasian reinsurance company. These models, he argued, can be ported to the Arctic.

His principles for Arctic partnership followed from the region’s brutal conditions:

• Availability-based payment,
• Paying for the capacity to operate rather than just construction;
• Allocating commercial risk to companies and political and infrastructure risk to states;
• Redundancy planning;
• Portfolio rather than one-off projects, with a port tied to a deposit, a logistics route, and weather monitoring;
• Unified standards and documents;
• Dedicated Arctic project companies with international-organization status;
• And a clear commercial purpose with real end-customers.

A View from Europe#

Tommaso Bontempi of Osservatorio Artico, Italy.

Tommaso Bontempi (Osservatorio Artico, Italy) delivered the panel’s most provocative outside perspective, arguing that Europe is behind in the Arctic—in understanding and in action.

Europe long assumed it could outsource security to alliances and partners; that assumption no longer holds. The US treatment of Greenland as a resource to be acquired, and unilateral American action over Hormuz with direct consequences for European energy security but no European voice, exposed a structural flaw: an architecture resting entirely on one external partner becomes a dependency. Reliance on Russian gas showed the same lesson from the other side—interdependence, taken on faith without a realistic assessment of interests, produced unsustainable dependence. Accepting that every actor pursues its interests, he argued, is not cynicism but the choice to exist as an independent political subject.

That independence, Bontempi continued, requires capacity. Europe as a unified actor cannot operate independently in polar waters—it has no EU icebreaker fleet, only national ones built for the Baltic.

“An actor that cannot move independently in a region is not an actor—it is a guest.”

He backed von der Leyen’s proposed EU Arctic fleet and serious work on Greenland’s critical-raw-materials potential, noting that Europe imports roughly 95 percent of its rare earths, caught between Chinese processing dominance and American appetite for Greenland’s resources.

Invoking the 1928 international rescue of Umberto Nobile’s airship Italia—where ideological enemies cooperated because geography demanded it—and Gorbachev’s 1987 Murmansk speech, he argued that where political trust is thin, technical and industrial cooperation on navigation safety, emergency management, and ecosystem protection remains open.

Europe’s goal, he closed, is not to ask permission but to bring real weight and a genuine voice to the Arctic table—which is what a common home actually requires.

How China Approaches Russian LNG#

Yana Leksyutina (Institute of China and Contemporary Asia, RAS), a China specialist, closed the panel with a clear-eyed look at Beijing’s calculations on Arctic liquefied natural gas—the most successful track of Russia–China Arctic cooperation.

Russia’s ambitious LNG strategy is tied to the Arctic, where its major plants sit; LNG projects also generate cargo for the Northern Sea Route. China entered as a major investor in Yamal LNG (from 2013, with Novatek) and Arctic LNG-2, but has consistently avoided Arctic oil projects such as Vostok Oil—its interest is gas first.

Investing brings long-term supply contracts, which China partly consumes and partly resells, plus experience in mega-projects and enormous orders: in Yamal LNG, Chinese firms took 85 percent of module fabrication and won $8.5 billion in shipping contracts, effectively recouping their investment. Participation also builds China’s coveted “Arctic identity” and, since 2022, its competence in the specialized equipment that departing Western suppliers once provided, though experts note the quality still lags.

Two forces pull in opposite directions. China’s gas demand is rising—driven partly by the green transition, with carbon neutrality targeted for 2060 and gas treated as a transition fuel, and partly by the energy hunger of its AI build-out—which sustains its interest in Russian supply. But Chinese strategy deliberately avoids dependence on any single partner, pushing domestic production and diversified sources even with its closest friend.

Sanctions are the decisive variable. Russian LNG, and Arctic LNG-2 specifically, became a targeted objective of US and European sanctions—driven, she argued, less by ideology than by commercial rivalry, as the US pursues LNG-export leadership. China fears secondary sanctions acutely, especially its banking sector: it remains in the unsanctioned Yamal LNG, shielded by Total and European partners, but has stopped new investment in the sanctioned Arctic LNG-2.

A New Map Is Drawn#

The Western channels are frozen, but a new map is being drawn—one in which Russia is the indispensable coordinator, partners from China and India to the UAE and the EAEU bring capital, technology, and markets, and sanctions risk shadows every deal.

What emerged across the panel was less a bloc than a network: overlapping bilateral tracks—Russia–China on LNG, Russia–India on rare earths and shipbuilding, the EAEU on infrastructure—each advancing at its own pace and each calibrated against the same constant, the threat of secondary sanctions. Cooperation is real but selective; partners hedge, diversify, and keep their distance from the projects Washington has marked, even as they deepen ties where the commercial logic holds. The ten-member BRICS format remains cumbersome.

The recurring idea was partnership grounded in real interest—neither illusion nor hostility, but the candid pursuit of overlapping goals in the region. If the Western Arctic order was built on shared institutions and assumed trust, the one taking shape here is built on transactions: narrower, more guarded, and more durable for making no pretense.