The Arctic—Our Common Home: Charting a Course Through Turbulence

”High Latitudes, Low Tension” No Longer a Reality#

Vladislav Maslennikov, Director of the European Affairs Department at Russia’s Foreign Ministry and Russia’s senior official to the Arctic Council.

Vladislav Maslennikov, Director of the European Affairs Department at Russia’s Foreign Ministry and Russia’s senior official to the Arctic Council, delivered the diplomatic keynote. His diagnosis was blunt: the old postulate of “high latitudes, low tension” no longer describes reality. Maslennikov set out the following:

• A new normal of tension. Rising geopolitical friction has reached the high latitudes, and the drive by some states to politicize virtually every form of interaction—economic, environmental, scientific—is now the chief obstacle to mutually beneficial cooperation.
• NATO’s expanding footprint. Maslennikov pointed to a sharp build-up of NATO’s offensive potential in the North, citing the new Arctic Sentry operation launched in February and the large-scale Cold Response 2026 exercises in March involving 32,000 troops from 14 NATO states, coordinated in part from a new NATO command structure at Mikkeli, Finland—barely 140–150 km from the Russian border.
• The collapse of regional mechanisms. Russia has been forced out of the Council of the Baltic Sea States and the Barents Euro-Arctic Council; cross-border programs, the Northern Dimension and contacts between indigenous peoples have been wound down. Karelia and the northwest of Russia, he noted, were among the first to feel these losses.
• The Arctic Council endures. It remains the sole multilateral format, and although its full work has been effectively frozen since 2022, Russia remains a full member, and all decisions still require consensus. He pointed to the May 2025 joint statement reaffirming the Council’s role, and to cautiously constructive contact with the Danish chairmanship, as Russia looks to restore the functional work of the Council.
• Pivot to non-regional partners. With Western dialogue stalled, Russia is deepening cooperation with states from beyond the region—China and India foremost—particularly around the Northern Sea Route.

Building the Corridor#

Alexander Sergunin, Professor at St. Petersburg State University and Director of the Center for Arctic Studies and Projects at RANEPA’s Northwest Institute.

Alexander Sergunin, professor at St. Petersburg State University and director of the Center for Arctic Studies and Projects at RANEPA’s Northwest Institute, turned from diplomacy to infrastructure—and offered the session’s most pointedly skeptical analysis. His subject was the Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor (TATC), the initiative President Putin launched in Murmansk in March 2025. Sergunin mapped out the following pivotal points necessary for the development of the TATC:

• From sea route to multimodal corridor. The TATC is a rebranding and expansion of Rosatom’s “Greater Northern Sea Route” (or Big NSR) concept. Rather than a single maritime artery, it envisions a multimodal corridor from the Baltic to the Pacific—roughly 14,000 km of sea route plus some 10,000 km of rail (the “Arctic rail polygon”), river and road links, anchored by the great Siberian rivers and a chain of more than twenty Arctic ports.
• Beware the inflated forecasts. Sergunin was openly skeptical of headline targets. The 2018 plan promised 80 million tonnes on the Northern Sea Route by 2024; the actual figure peaked near 37.8 million. He sees little prospect of meeting the 2030–2035 projections, given the lack of cargo base.
• A catalogue of unsolved problems. Among them: building an ice-class gas-carrier fleet for the sanctioned Arctic LNG-2 project; modernizing more than twenty largely outdated ports; completing nascent rail projects such as the Northern Latitudinal Railway and Belkomur; and creating a national digital transport-logistics platform.
• Strategy must catch up. Russia’s transport strategy and Arctic doctrine need revision; the new Arctic strategy to 2050, now under discussion, should replace the “Northern Sea Route” framing with the TATC concept. And the corridor must be stitched into adjacent routes—the North–South corridor toward Iran and India in the west, the Pacific leg toward China and the Vladivostok–Chennai line in the east.

How to Finance the Arctic#

Maxim Dankin, Member of the State Commission for Arctic Development and Director General of the Project Office for Arctic Development (PORA).

While Sergunin mapped the structural challenges of the corridor itself, Maxim Dankin—member of the State Commission for Arctic Development and director general of the Project Office for Arctic Development (PORA)—deliberately turned inward, to the question of financing. Karelia, he argued, is the southwestern gateway of the Russian Arctic, linking the Baltic, the White Sea and European Russia, and its case is therefore federal in significance. Dankin proposed the following ideas:

• A structural contradiction. The Arctic economy pairs enormous macroeconomic weight in resource projects with chronically underfunded municipalities, especially small and remote ones. Resources work best when concentrated on “anchor settlements” (which also appear as backbone or support settlements in English discourse) capable of generating jobs, investment and traffic for the periphery.
• The Kem–Belomorsk agglomeration as a model. It already holds anchor-settlement status and a master plan worth nearly 30 billion rubles, with some 20 billion in committed resident investment—but that status is not yet tied to mandatory federal financial instruments. Closing that gap is the central task.
• The Belomorsk–Baltic Canal must be reborn. Once carrying 7–9 million tonnes a year, it now moves around 200,000, constrained by 14.3-meter locks and ~4-meter depth. As Russia’s only inland water route from the Baltic to the Arctic on its own territory, it should be treated not as a local hydro-engineering project but as part of a new Baltic–White Sea–Northern Sea Route network—possibly even via a modern “duplicate” canal costed at over 100 billion rubles, financed through a mixed model of federal funds, infrastructure loans, concessions and friendly-nation capital.
• New, non-budgetary capital. He called for a new class of targeted inter-municipal bonds backed by project revenues (piloted as a special legal regime to 2030), and for an endowment fund to sustain social facilities after construction. The model, he argued, is replicable across the northwest—to Arkhangelsk, the Murmansk transport hub and Vorkuta—and Karelia could lead the federal agenda. Crucially, international capital, on the Yamal LNG model, should be welcomed rather than barred, provided protective institutional mechanisms are in place.

The New Geopolitical Order and the “Backdoor” of the Arctic#

Dmitry Danilov, Head of the European Security Department at the Institute of Europe (RAS) and Professor at MGIMO.

The final report, from Dmitry Danilov, head of the European Security Department at the Institute of Europe (RAS) and professor at MGIMO, pulled back to the widest frame—the Arctic as one theatre within a transformed global order:

• Deterrence has displaced the old dichotomy. The familiar balance of “deterrence versus cooperation” is gone. The crisis triggered around Ukraine has produced a substantive rupture not only in European security but in the world order itself, and systemic deterrence now defines strategic planning—making confrontation a long-term horizon, not a passing phase.
• Force is back at the center. The military-political dimension has become the dominant feature of mutual deterrence; few regions, the Arctic included, can escape this logic.
• A networked, multidimensional structure. Confrontation now extends across the whole system of international relations—the US treats China as its principal challenge yet also seeks to contain its own European allies. Danilov read this as a symptom of the Euro-Atlantic community’s self-erosion: unable to secure normative dominance, it leans harder on deterrence. In parallel, non-Western multilateral structures (such as BRICS) are forming that are not inherently anti-Western, and within them Russia and partners increasingly emphasize Arctic cooperation.
• NATO’s “open window.” Danilov urged precision against the easy claim that “NATO is everywhere in the Arctic.” The real questions, he argued, are how much NATO as an organization is actually present, and whether it will develop an independent Arctic strategy. NATO, he suggested, is entering the Arctic “through the back door”—via the climate agenda—and the prospect of a full collective strategy remains an open “window of opportunity.”
• Two scenarios to monitor. One is a full NATO Arctic strategy with collective defence and large-scale military planning under Article 5—the most dangerous for Russia. The other is the status quo of “aggregate potential” without a collective strategy, which paradoxically raises the flexibility, and therefore the unpredictability, of Western (especially US) planning.

A Common Thread#

A single theme bound the session together: the need to stop pulling the blanket in separate directions. Maslennikov’s call to revive interregional project cooperation, Sergunin’s—to harmonize regional planning, Dankin’s insistence that someone must step forward, and Danilov’s warning that the Arctic must be read within the whole geopolitical system all pointed the same way.

As the moderator Valery Shlyamin put it, there is no sharper question in the North than how to bring coordination to a landscape that has grown loose and unbalanced—and the longer the answers are delayed, the more costly that delay becomes.

The forum’s title, repeated almost as a refrain, carried its own quiet argument. The Arctic remains a common home—today, with those who choose to cooperate, and there is a clear hope in the air for a future where neighbors once again find that good relations serve them better than rivalry.