The Western Arctic After the Freeze

Spatial Planning as “Soft Security”#

Alexander Kotov of the Institute of Europe (RAS).

Alexander Kotov of the Institute of Europe (RAS) opened with the panel’s most systematic attempt to answer the central question: how do you coordinate the management of a shared physical space when the political channels have been closed?

His answer was to shift the focus away from the blocked global level and down toward the decentralized, vital business of coexistence—what he framed as “soft security.” Arctic sovereignty, he argued, is not in dispute; but it is functionally indivisible when it comes to saving lives and to transboundary environmental events. An oil spill, an invasive species, a forest fire, the migration of cod stocks—none of these respects a closed border. Kotov’s organizing idea was “ecological realism”: economic activity in the Arctic (LNG, lithium, fishing) will not stop, so the balance is sought not by banning industry but by spatial demarcation—hard quotas on the human footprint and the carving-out of biosphere cores.

The method he proposed for a world of severed IT platforms was what he called decentralized, or “mirror,” monitoring: the parties agree in advance on common scientific indicators—for permafrost degradation, fish biomass, water quality—then collect data independently and publish it in the open international academic space, preserving continuous data series without any direct interagency contact. Around this he built a layered scheme matching each Russian subject of the Western Arctic to its foreign counterpart and to a shared fate: Murmansk Region with northern Norway (oil-spill risk, cod migration, vessel noise); Karelia with Finnish Lapland (taiga degradation, fires, tourism pressure); Arkhangelsk with Scotland, Iceland, and the Faroes (aquaculture-technology dependence); the Nenets District with the circumpolar reindeer-herding zone of Fennoscandia.

Kotov was candid about the limits. Nordic planning is decentralized to the municipal level, so local authorities can block macro-regional projects over short-term inconvenience; central governments, citing “hard security,” order all contact with Russia cut, forcing whatever coordination survives to hide as purely local initiative. His prescription was to work directly with local stakeholders—border communes, reindeer-herder associations, small technology firms, universities—and sell the financial and ecological benefits of coordination where they touch citizens directly. He sketched a roadmap for drawing Karelia into a climate dialogue with Lapland between 2027 and 2029, and made an unexpected case for tourism as a high-technology “experience industry” capable of holding space together, virtually for now and physically when borders reopen.

A Divided North America and Its European Echo#

Natalia Vyakhireva of the Institute for the US and Canada Studies (ISKRAN) traced what a fracturing North American Arctic means for the European one—and found the two more tightly coupled than the map suggests.

The role of the United States in the Arctic, she argued, is not shrinking but growing, even as its relations with the other two members of the North American sub-region deteriorate. Ties with Canada have soured, and relations with Greenland—within the Kingdom of Denmark—have been strained to breaking by Trump’s territorial claims and the Greenland crisis of January 2026. US steps she summarized as ramping up hydrocarbon extraction, securing critical minerals, expanding the military presence, distancing itself from multilateral Arctic governance, and abandoning the climate agenda. A recent New York Times report, she noted, suggested Washington is seeking an indefinite military presence in Greenland and a veto over major investment deals even if the island gains independence, precisely to exclude competitors like Russia and China.

The consequence is a scramble among the other actors to hedge. Unable to sever ties with Washington, Canada, Greenland, and the Nordic states are quietly distancing themselves. Canada in particular has pivoted toward multilateral cooperation with NATO partners, especially Finland and Sweden: ballistic-steel production with Sweden’s SSAB, interest in Saab’s Gripen as an alternative to the F-35, strategic-partnership agreements with both, a Finnish-built icebreaker, and science offices opened with France in Greenland in a pointed show of support for its sovereignty. Washington’s indirect reaction—the announced US withdrawal from the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, created with Canada in 1940—she read less as a complaint about burden-sharing than as displeasure at an ally drifting toward Europe.

The upshot for the European Arctic, Vyakhireva concluded, is an open question about the future of strategic cooperation, an erosion of trust inside the Western bloc and NATO itself, and a sharpening of the sovereignty question. On the Northwest Passage, she described a tacit Canada–US “agreement to disagree” that has not spilled into other areas—but noted recent Canadian alarm that Trump might next contest the passage’s status as internal waters, with the chair adding that some 60 percent of the world’s icebreakers are built, and 80 percent designed, in Finland.

The Myths of Nordic Neutrality#

Nikita Belukhin of IMEMO (RAS).

Nikita Belukhin of IMEMO (RAS) delivered the panel’s most historical and most revisionist argument: that Russia’s understanding of why Sweden and Finland abandoned neutrality is unfinished, and that the comfortable stories on both sides are wrong.

Two polar views dominate, he said—that joining NATO was an irrational, anti-democratic break with tradition, or that it merely formalized a reality long in place. Both are partly right, and both inflame debate. Belukhin’s own framing began from a point of definition: Swedish neutrality was never enshrined in any constitution or treaty; it was a foreign-policy ideology, as in Finland. The full Swedish formula spoke of “freedom from alliances in peacetime aiming at neutrality in war”—aiming at, he stressed, not guaranteeing. Swedish military men during the Cold War openly doubted the country could stay neutral in a bloc-on-bloc conflict.

From this he proposed a “dilemma of neutrality”: any state proclaiming a neutral status must still plan for the contingency in which the risks of remaining neutral exceed those of abandoning it. Sweden, he argued, prepared exactly for that—to exit neutrality on the most controlled terms possible if war came—which makes the Russian habit of describing Swedish neutrality as a stabilizing “tradition” a painful one to examine. Does foreign policy even have traditions, he asked, or only national interests dressed as inertia? He cited post–Cold War Swedish scholarship, notably Holmström’s Den dolda alliansen (“The Hidden Alliance”), which caused a furor in 2011 by revealing that Sweden had not in fact been neutral, and a 2024 account of how Stockholm followed Helsinki into NATO almost passively.

Belukhin identified four “semantic nodes” that dissolved the internal logic of Swedish non-alignment—the admission that a surprise attack could not be excluded, the blurring of war and peace by the concept of hybrid threat, the belief that Article 5 would still be needed despite informal Western membership, and the conviction that Sweden’s security was inseparable from the Baltic states’—and suggested the same logic could erode Austrian and Swiss neutrality. He closed with a warning drawn from Nordic analysts themselves: the real danger to Northern Europe is not a massive Russia–NATO clash but a limited conflict the alliance would have neither the means nor the will to enter—which is why these states work to keep the “escalation slider” maximally sensitive and the region from slipping off the alliance’s agenda.

Keeping the Data Flowing: SAON and Mirror Monitoring#

Nadezhda Kharlampyeva of St. Petersburg State University brought the discussion to the concrete problem of scientific observation, drawing on the history of SAON (Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks) and the work of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute.

Her account was partly a cautionary tale about how easily Russia can be written out of international scientific structures. As external experts on one project, her team found that of 71 questionnaires, only 24 represented the Russian Federation—and that they could not always tell who within Russia had answered. The realization that this could all be managed from abroad prompted the question of why Russia was not doing it itself. With the university acting as intermediary between agencies, her group organized seminars in 2017–2018 whose conclusions, she argued, remain valid today.

Her recommendations were specific: create a national SAON committee; advance a Russian SAON project through the Arctic Council toward the fifth International Polar Year; and publish Russian SAON activity on recommended “Open Science” resources. The urgency, she warned, is that decisions are now being taken without Russia—a regional ocean-studies association is being formed in its absence—and may later dictate terms. The virtual, platform-based mode of interaction she saw as the most workable solution, especially for graduate students and cartographers currently barred from international platforms. She was cool toward a suggestion to create a BRICS office for what is properly scientific work—“the scientific community will not understand it”—pointing instead to the Eurasian office of the 2007–2008 International Polar Year as the precedent to revive.

The Theory of Cross-Border Cooperation#

Alexander Sebentsov of the Institute of Geography (RAS), a specialist on Russia’s borderlands, offered the theoretical scaffolding for everything the other speakers were describing in practice.

Cross-border cooperation, he explained, is built around playing on differences across a border while lowering the costs and raising the benefits of the border’s existence—solving problems without moving the line itself, neutralizing what he called the “totality” of borders. In the Arctic, because of sparse population, even local border cooperation must operate over enormous territories, which turns it transnational and, inevitably, political—nothing happens without the state. His central image was a layered scheme of a region divided by a border: its components have different abilities to “penetrate” the line. Natural conditions and resources need no permission at all; the further down the scheme one goes, the higher the transaction costs of crossing.

The implication, connecting directly to Kotov’s argument, was that the upper, less politicized layers of the scheme are where cooperation survives longest in a freeze and resumes first in a thaw. He illustrated with the dense, overlapping institutional map of the EU and the Baltic—the very “clutter” of institutions for which Brussels is often criticized, but which built redundant bridges, so that when one institution failed another could carry the function. The lesson for Russia was to take this experience of territorial cooperation programs and their financial instruments and apply it along its other frontiers. The Karelia Euroregion he cited as a success precisely because cooperation operated at the regional level with real funding, while small municipal euroregions, lacking resources, quickly withered.

What Survives: Lessons from the Karelia and Kolarctic Programs#

Dmitry Bazegsky of the Karelian Research Centre (RAS) presented joint work—delivered on behalf of his co-author Anastasia Vasilyeva—evaluating the ecological projects of the Karelia and Kolarctic cross-border programs, and asking whether their “green” results can be reused.

The relevance, he argued, is rising: ecological problems in the Russian Arctic are intensifying under heavy anthropogenic load and the legacy of Soviet-era military-industrial pollution, while Russian organizations have lost access to the European green-technology market. His hypothesis was that the green know-how of these programs retains its value and can be used in other Russian regions today. Grant contracts covered 27 projects in Karelia and 18 in Kolarctic, with €34.4 million in external financing against more than €23 million in Russian co-financing. After the European Commission unilaterally froze financing, roughly half the projects were left formally unfinished; Russian organizations completed them with their own money. In Sortavala the program built a water intake while the local utility closed the last sewage outfalls into Lake Ladoga; elsewhere, solar panels, tourist infrastructure, and clean-fuel conversions went into national parks and reserves.

The survey results held a surprise. More than 77 percent of participants in Murmansk and Arkhangelsk Regions said the problems could have been solved through Russian federal or regional programs—only a small group saw real value in the international format—prompting Bazegsky to wonder how ready Russian organizations actually are for international cooperation, recalling the attitude that “you give us the money, we’ll solve it ourselves.” His decisive legal finding, much welcomed by the chair, was that the joint developments belong to the Russian projects: it is written into the programs’ General Conditions, so there is no obstacle to reusing and multiplying the green practices—forest-fire prevention, clean water supply, water treatment, waste recycling—across other regions of the Russian Arctic.

The Arctic as Seen from Italy#

Giuseppe Cappelluti, geopolitics expert on Eurasian affairs.

Giuseppe Cappelluti, an independent geopolitics expert on Eurasian affairs, closed the panel with a study of an entirely different kind: a qualitative content analysis of how five Italian outlets have portrayed the Arctic from 2019 to May 2026.

His sample ranged from the popular-science to the sharply geopolitical: the public broadcaster RAI News 24, the center-left La Repubblica, the center-right Il Giornale, and two geopolitical journals, Limes and the crowdfunded, Catholic-inflected Insideover. Across all of them, the controlling finding was a counterintuitive one: the geopolitical boom around the Arctic is tied less to the start of the special military operation than to the return of Donald Trump to the White House. RAI News 24 turned from science and nature toward geopolitics in 2022, but it was after Trump’s victory that 21 of its 49 articles in one year concerned the US and Greenland. La Repubblica, the outlet most attentive to ecology, reversed its Greenland stance from cautious support for independence to defending Denmark against Trump’s claims. Il Giornale, where environmental coverage is nearly absent, fixed on Italy’s own Arctic strategy and the figures of Meloni, Crosetto, and Tajani.

The geopolitical journals told the same story from the other end. Limes, Italy’s first geopolitical journal, had run a stable 20–25 Arctic articles a year (peaking at 71 in 2019 with a dedicated dossier), with recurring attention to the Northern Sea Route and the “ice Silk Road.” Cappelluti’s conclusions were crisp: ecology sits on the left and politics on the right of the press; Trump’s designs on Greenland lifted Arctic interest everywhere; the special military operation produced no comparable spike among the geopolitical outlets; and the sea routes themselves receive little attention, almost only through a foreign-policy lens. The North, he reminded the room, also lives in the press as sport, daily life, and culture—a marathon run in Yakutia at minus 53 degrees—alongside the high geopolitics.

A Common Space That Sanctions Have Not Erased#

If the first subsection described a new international map drawn around Russia, this one described the geography beneath it: a single physical and economic space that sanctions and the political rift have not removed. The recurring move across the panel was consistent—the treaty-level, capital-to-capital channels are blocked, so cooperation shifts to a level where work can still continue. For Kotov that level is “mirror” monitoring and the border commune; for Sebentsov, the depoliticized upper layers of the cross-border scheme; for Kharlampyeva, open-science publication and the graduate student; for Bazegsky, the legally Russian-owned green practice, ready to be reused.

None of the speakers expected the official channels to reopen soon, and none presented the workarounds as a full substitute for them. What they described was closer to a holding pattern: keep the data series unbroken, the local contacts active, and the ownership of past work clearly settled, so that whenever conditions allow, the groundwork is already in place.