A Flipped Map, Wildfire Math, and Regional Ties
The plenary session of the Northern Sustainable Development Forum in Yakutsk. From left: Anatoly Semenov, Anatoly Nikolaev, Sergey Karaganov, Aisen Nikolaev, Sakhamin Afanasyev, Anton Vasiliev, and Vladimir Vasiliev. Source: NSDF Press Service
Last week I had the chance to go to Yakutsk for the Northern Sustainable Development Forum, held October 7–10. It was a certain dépaysement: from +10°C in Petrozavodsk to −10°C in Yakutsk in a single day.
The forum’s general theme—human capital in the age of AI—ran through a number of sections, some highly philosophical, others thoroughly hands-on. Below are the sessions that produced the most highlights, in my opinion: a debate on “northernness,” a climate section with some head-scratching data, and a meeting of the Russian-Asian Consortium for Arctic Research (RACAR).
A press conference at the forum. Source: NSDF Press Service
The Wrong Way Round: The Northernness Session
The first session I want to highlight was devoted to “northernness” and the people of the North, in Russia and in general. Held as the Third Tobolsk Readings, a joint session of the Tobolsky Club and the Lena Club, it was titled The Third Turn to the North: The Evolution of Russia’s Civilizational Identity and moderated by the writer Evgeny Popov and the political scientist Sergey Karaganov. It asked what the “infrastructure sovereignty” of the North means in practice, which mechanisms of accelerated development work and which need fine-tuning, under what conditions investment in infrastructure produces a demographic effect, and how northernness fits into Russia’s civilizational identity.
The session on northernness, held as the Third Tobolsk Readings. Source: NSDF Press Service
The highlight was a talk by Dmitry Vydrin, a former adviser to four Ukrainian presidents. He told an anecdote that, to my mind, describes Russia’s geopolitical position—and the unfortunate turns it has produced for Russia historically—quite well:
Vydrin’s wife had a spinal problem that conventional medicine could not fix, so they traveled to a traditional healer in a remote mountain village in Dagestan. The healer ran his hand along her back and found the problem zones. Then he caught Vydrin’s skeptical look, put him on the couch too, and found an old injury Vydrin had told no one about.
The next day Vydrin came back with a large map of Russia, laid it on the couch, and asked the healer to “examine” the country as if it were a living body. The surprised healer’s first verdict was that the map was lying the wrong way and needed to be flipped!
A Russian proverb says you should keep your head cool and your feet warm. Russia does the opposite, said Vydrin: its head lies in the scorching European frying pan, while its legs freeze in Siberia and the North.
Vydrin built several ideas on this anecdote:
- Law and canon. He defined a civilization as a territory where formal law and unwritten canon (the accumulated rules of life) coincide. The deeper you go into Siberia, he argued, the closer the two get.
- Developing versus settling. In his phrase, a territory is “developed when the husbands move there and settled when wives and children follow,” bringing kindergartens, schools, and clean streets with them. This, by the way, recalls the Jack London effect, when the supporting economy—teachers, doctors, shopkeepers—stays on after the resource boom has passed and keeps the region developing.
- Not mercantile. He praised the Baikal-Amur Mainline as a project built for spirit and daring rather than profit, and suggested that the next great Siberian projects will be led by people who are not afraid of discomfort and risk.
Northernness as a Way of Living in Space
At the same session, the St. Petersburg State University professor Maria Lagutina offered a more academic framing in a series of theses:
- Northernness is less about geography and climate than a historically formed way of living in a vast, complex, and heterogeneous space. That is why the question of the North is also a question of Russian identity.
- It fits the “civilization-state” concept now used by Russia, China, and India as an alternative to the Western nation-state: unity through diversity. Pyotr Savitsky’s idea of mestorazvitie (a territory and its society forming one whole) applies here too.
- Developing the North (osvoenie) and making a home in it (obzhivanie) are not the same. The 2008 Fundamentals of Russian Arctic policy treated the region as a resource base. Yakutia’s first president, Mikhail Nikolaev, warned that this turns the Arctic into a periphery. In the 2020 edition, resources dropped from first to fourth place and people came to the fore.
- The northern cultural code was formed by the interaction of Russian, Pomor, and Siberian traditions with the knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples. The question is not which code dominates but how they interact.
- Russia is acquiring a northeastern dimension. The Northern Sea Route and the Transarctic Transport Corridor should be judged not only by cargo flows but by whether they connect towns and people or simply export resources.
Quoting the ethnographer Andrei Golovnev, she argued that seeing itself as “the North” frees Russia from the West–East dichotomy, in which neither side fully accepts it.
Fires, Not Factories: The Climate Section
The expert session Climate Regulation in Russia 2026: New Rules of the Game for the Arctic was moderated by Anastasia Gabrashitova, director of ALROSA’s environmental center, and Nadezhda Krasilnikova, vice-rector for external relations and educational pathways at the Siberian State University of Water Transport. Its questions ranged from how the largest subsoil users build climate governance as a tool of national economic sovereignty and whether industrial companies in the Far East and the Arctic have effective adaptation strategies, to which climate projects are on the Russian-Chinese agenda and which initiatives matter for Yakutia’s carbon neutrality concept.
What might catch the listener off guard is that Yakutia’s carbon footprint is defined not by industry but by wildfires. If you want to tackle climate change and cut the carbon footprint here, it is far more effective to reduce the number of fires than to squeeze a few more percent out of industrial companies.
That is not to say industry sat idle. The two big miners presented their own environmental projects. ALROSA argued that the kimberlite rock it processes binds CO₂ from the air as carbonates—about 1 million metric tons a year, slightly more than the company’s own emissions—which makes it, by its own account, carbon neutral without offsets. Norilsk Nickel’s Kola Mining and Metallurgical Company reported cutting sulfur dioxide emissions from about 500,000 to 14,000 tons a year since 1990, showed that carbon from forests damaged in the Soviet decades has accumulated in the soil around its plant, and argued that land reclamation should therefore earn carbon units too.
Mikhail Ivanov of Bauman Moscow State Technical University, who works on the republic’s carbon balance, put these efforts in proportion. Yakutia holds 266 million hectares of forest fund: 83% of its territory and a fifth of all Russia’s forests. From 2019 to 2023, all technogenic emissions (energy, industry, agriculture, waste) came to about 15 million tons of CO₂-equivalent a year. Emissions in the land-use and forestry line, almost entirely from fires, averaged around 104 million tons. In a normal year without big fires, the republic is a net sink of 35–41 million tons.
The arithmetic is stark. If companies ambitiously cut emissions by 5% over five years, that is roughly 1 million tons—less than 1% of what the fires emit. Fire also strips the moss and litter that insulate the permafrost, triggering thermokarst. Some fires go underground and smolder through the winter.
Ivanov also walked through the fire record. In 2021, when Yakutia’s fires made world news, almost 8 million hectares burned. About 85% of fires are started by lightning, he noted, and some 70% of the forest fund still lies in zones where, by law, fires may be left to burn.
Yet money and technology work. After federal funding for fire protection roughly doubled, the share of fires put out on the first day rose from 25% to 63%, and 2025 became the first year without an emergency regime. Drones, satellites, forecasting models, and AI do much of the work: in several Siberian projects, AI-equipped cameras on cell towers recognize smoke and send its coordinates to the fire service. The system even feeds itself, as the carbon units earned by preventing fires pay for more cameras and equipment.
RACAR: Russia and China in the Arctic, Region to Region
The RACAR session. Source: NSDF Press Service
The RACAR session, moderated by Nyurgun Maksimov, vice-rector for international cooperation at the North-Eastern Federal University, focused on Russian-Chinese Arctic cooperation and the role of regions, with a delegation from Harbin Institute of Technology in the room and Guo Peiqing of the Ocean University of China joining by video call. It asked how the new architecture of international relations, including in the Arctic, is changing the geography of Russian-Chinese ties; which intergovernmental and regional formats of dialogue work best today; which joint regional projects could be supported; and what it would take for Heilongjiang to restore its membership in the Northern Forum and for other Chinese provinces to join.
Its main message: relations between Moscow and Beijing are at a peak, but cooperation between actual regions lags far behind.
The Mohe–Naiba Corridor
Vladimir Petrovsky of the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia walked through the most advanced north–south project:
- A new deep-water port at Naiba, over 100 kilometers from Tiksi.
- Barges up the Lena to Nizhny Bestyakh.
- Rail along the Amur-Yakutsk Mainline to Dzhalinda, then a new bridge across the Amur to Mohe in China.
Work on the Naiba terminal is already underway, as Putin highlighted at Valdai earlier this month. We covered it in our posts on Putin’s pitch for the Arctic corridors and Russia’s efforts to link Yakutia to China.
Going Deeper, Not Wider
Ambassador Anton Vasiliev. Source: NSDF Press Service
Ambassador Anton Vasiliev stressed that cooperation with China in the Arctic is not a card played against third countries, and warned against Western attempts to drive a wedge between the two. Visa-free travel and direct flights from Yakutsk to Harbin (and soon Beijing) are already changing the picture. His advice was to finish existing projects before chasing new ones, and to bring Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, and Inner Mongolia into the Northern Forum. He also made a practical plea: even in the age of AI, never economize on Russian-Chinese interpretation, because bad translation can ruin the best-prepared meeting.
The Northern Forum as a “Project Interface”
Vladimir Vasiliev, executive director of the Northern Forum, said Chinese provinces are interested but are waiting for a signal from Beijing. Maria Lagutina proposed that membership be built around a project agenda: a province joins by naming two or three priority areas and potential partners. Because its members are regions rather than states, the Forum can work on “low politics” (science, education, climate adaptation, tourism, cold-climate construction) without competing with intergovernmental channels.
Living in the North, Not Just Developing It
Taken together, the three sessions pointed in the same direction. The northernness debate asked Russia to stop treating the North as a periphery to be developed and to start treating it as a place to live. The climate section showed that in Yakutia the decisive climate policy is not industrial but forest policy: putting fires out on the first day counts for more than years of corporate emission cuts. And RACAR made clear that the Russian-Chinese partnership, celebrated in Moscow and Beijing, will become real in the Arctic only when the regions have solid projects of their own.
In each case, the answer lay less in grand strategy than in unglamorous work on the ground: towns where families stay, firefighters who arrive fast, projects that get finished, and interpreters who get the words right. Russian has a phrase for it—rabota na mestakh, literally “work in the places”—and it is this local work that moves the regions forward.
