home, Putin has been testing the West—exploiting opportunities in Ukraine (Crimea and Donbas) and Syria.
The Arctic is a keystone of that policy, because only here—as Putin said in December 2017—is there real scope for territorial expansion and resource acquisition. This builds on and deepens the main asset of Russia’s unbalanced economy—its continued heavy reliance on the extraction and export of raw materials, especially oil and gas—which no modern leader of the country has been able to change.
The natural resources in Russia’s Arctic region already account for a fifth of the country’s GDP. The oil and gas under the North Pole offer the prospect of huge additional wealth but it will take time, money and technology to exploit, not to mention much international haggling. Somewhat easier pickings may be in the offing thanks to the thawing northern rim of Siberia—14,000 miles of coastline from Murmansk to the Bering Strait—both on land and in Russia’s territorial waters. De-icing opens up new opportunities for mining—from hydrocarbons to lithium—and shipping, but the melting of permafrost also harbors the problems of collapsing infrastructure, oil spills and toxic leaks, as the costly accidents at Norilsk and in Kamchatka in 2020 revealed.72
Russia has complemented its economic activities with an Arctic security policy, involving bases and ice-breakers. In December 2014, Moscow announced that it intended to station military units all along its Arctic coast, and began pouring money into airfields, ports, radar stations and barracks. The new infrastructure includes two huge complexes: the Northern Shamrock on Kotelny Island and the Arctic Trefoil on Franz Josef Land, 620 miles from the North Pole. Taken together, Russia’s six biggest Arctic bases in the High North will be home to about a thousand soldiers serving there for up to 18 months at a time in constant snow, permanently sub-zero temperatures from October until June, and no daylight for nearly half the year. Moscow is now concentrating on making airfields accessible year-round. Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, “our Arctic border areas were stripped bare,” Pavel Makarevich, a member of the Russian Geographical Society, proclaimed. “Now they are being restored.”73
No other country has militarized its Arctic North to anything like this extent. And none can match Russia’s 40-strong ice-breaker fleet, which is used to clear channels for military and civilian use. Three nuclear-powered ice-breakers, including the world’s largest, are now under construction to complement the six already in operation. Russia is also giving its naval warships an ice-breaking capacity. By 2021 the Northern Fleet, based near Murmansk, is due to get two ice-capable corvettes, armed with cruise missiles.74
The scale of Russia’s endeavor becomes clearer when one considers that the next countries on the ice-breaker list currently are Finland (eight vessels), Canada (seven), Sweden (four), China (three) and then the United States (two).75 We are not talking about Cold War-era militarization, when the Soviets packed much more firepower in the Arctic and were geared to wage nuclear war with the United States. Arctic bases were staging posts for long-range bombers to fly to the United States. Now, in an era when a slow-motion battle for the Arctic’s energy reserves is unfolding, Russia is creating a permanent and nimble conventional military presence in small packets that are highly mobile and capable of rapid reaction. Furthermore, having tested its hypersonic Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missiles in the Arctic in 2019 with the quiet threat to regionally deploy them, Russia has in 2020 begun preparations to resume testing of nuclear cruise missiles on Novaya Zemlya, all the while, according to U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Paul Zukunft, “building ice-capable combatants” that can launch cruise missiles with ranges “as far south as Miami, Florida.”76
The scale of Russia’s Arctic ambitions is not in doubt. In March 2015, Moscow conducted the largest full-scale readiness exercise in the Arctic since the collapse of the USSR. It deployed 45,000 soldiers, 3,360 vehicles, 110 aircraft, 41 naval vessels and 15 submarines, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense. On Navy Day, July 30, 2017, Russia made a point of showing off its naval might across the world, from Tartus in Syria to Sebastopol and Vladivostok, and, above all, in the Baltic waters of St. Petersburg under Putin’s approving eye. Up to a point, Putin’s naval show that day represented a Potemkin village, for Russia’s 2018 defense budget of $61.4 billion was small compared to America’s spending of $649 billion, and even China’s $250 billion.77 Yet it would be an error to write off the resurgent Russian fleet as mere bluff and bluster. In fact, in July 2017, Russia and China held their first common naval drills, called Joint Sea 2017, in Baltic waters, bringing the Chinese uncomfortably close to one of the most turbulent fault lines in East-West relations; and once again, China was an active participant in a 2018 exercise, the massive Vostok 2018 maneuvers (throughout Siberia and all the way to the Pacific), officially with some 300,000 Russian service members. Both countries’ growing focus on the North became evident when—it seems by chance—the crew of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter found the Chinese and Russian navies conducting a joint exercise simulating a potential small-scale military encounter in the Bering Strait in the summer of 2020.78
Perceptions matter as much as crude power projection. In this vein, the Kremlin regularly releases pictures of President Putin in snow gear, of ice-breakers in the Arctic Ocean, and of troops training in white fatigues, brandishing assault rifles as they zip along on sleighs pulled by reindeer. And now that Russia’s military forces can move with agility to deliver precise and deadly strikes, they are far more useful. Such forces need not be enormous. If cleverly deployed, even a small military hand can deliver a big blow with success—as Russia did in Ukraine and Syria, outmaneuvering the West. Through its new presence and military build-up, Russia can also deny others access to polar terrain—just as China has managed to do in the East and South China seas. And it does so under the pretext that as “the Arctic region has become a zone where geopolitical, geo-strategic and economic interests of the world’s leading powers are colliding,” Russia must be able to counter what it sees as the U.S. challenge to its control of its “Arctic zone,” especially at the economically and strategically significant NSR’s entry points, the Bering Strait and the Barents Sea.79
Still, to realize the kaleidoscope of its Arctic ambitions, Russia has to crack the Potemkin problem. It still lacks the necessary technology and finance to open up the new Arctic, onshore and offshore. Deep sea ports and supply stations need to be built along the Northern Sea Route, as well long-distance railway lines, motorways and undersea fiber-optic data cable networks. Because of U.S. and EU sanctions since 2014, Russia cannot rely primarily on investment from the West. That is why it has begun to turn to China for money and markets.80
To President Xi Jinping, Russia’s Arctic ambitions present an opportunity for China to use its economic might to increase its global influence. Xi, like Putin, sees the Arctic as a crucial element of the country’s geopolitical vision. Now that the People’s Republic is no longer an introspective state, but one that has “grown rich and become strong,” as Xi declared in his December 2017 New Year’s Eve speech, it intends not only to become “a great modern socialist country” but the “keeper of international order.” America’s long-time abstention from Arctic power politics seemed then to be offering the PRC an unexpected gift.81
The scale of Xi’s vision is remarkable. In 2013 China embarked on the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, the most expensive foreign infrastructure plan in history. It is a two-pronged development strategy, encompassing the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road,” which together map out a highly integrated set of land-based and maritime economic corridors linking thousands of miles of markets from Asia to western Europe. Late in 2017 Xi called for close Sino-Russian co-operation on the Northern Sea Route in order to realize what he called a “Silk Road on Ice.” Although cast in terms of mutual benefit, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a means to strengthen China’s influence and security along its strategically important periphery.82
By making the infrastructure plan an integral part of its constitution and announcing that by 2050 China would be a “leading global power,” Xi has shown long-term thinking on a grand scale. He has done so by arousing genuine excitement about the future—so different in tone from the small-minded negativism about lost greatness that emanates from Trump. Indeed, this is the kind of visionary leadership that