On January 9, 2024, the Swedish Defense Secretary, General Michael Biden, took to the stage in Saren, Sweden, and delivered a presentation meant to shock. he asked, overlaying a series of gruesome images from the front lines of the Ukraine war against a backdrop of snow-covered Swedish fields. “Do you think this is Sweden?”
These questions are unimaginable for a country that has maintained a cautious 75-year strategy of peaceful non-alignment with NATO until February 2022. In a 2012 speech, then-Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces Sverka Göransson said that in the event of an attack, “Sweden could survive for a week.” However, at the recent Society and Defense Conference held in Saren, leaders made it clear that the days of not focusing on defense are over. Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson urged people to prepare to defend themselves “with arms in hand and with our lives.”
For Russia’s Scandinavian neighbors, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine disrupted the calm calculation of neutrality. Finland became a new member of NATO last year, and Sweden is likely to follow soon, pending approval from Hungary. These new Northern Alliances are changing the geopolitical balance of power, with her NATO countries in the Arctic soon outnumbering Russia 7 to 1. And just as melting Arctic ice opens up new resources and routes for global economic competition, it also exposes new defense vulnerabilities.
Today, as Ukraine and its NATO allies push Russia into a corner, world leaders, along with the Scandinavians themselves, are increasingly turning their troubled gaze north. They ask: How likely is it that infections will spread in colder climates?
“Increasing competition and militarization in the Arctic region…is concerning,” Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, said at the Arctic General Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 2023. said in a speech. “We must prepare for military conflict in the Arctic.”
“Decreasing tensions in the Arctic”: World leaders and analysts alike are referring to a period of relative polar stability following the Cold War. Over the past decades, bilateral and international agreements between Russia and other Arctic states have emphasized shared northern security as well as scientific and security interests. However, these arrangements quickly fell apart after Russia invaded Ukraine in earnest. In March 2022, the Arctic Council, a forum among eight Arctic nations, suspended talks. (It cautiously resumed in May 2023, but Russia’s involvement has not yet been disclosed.) In September 2023, Russia accused Scandinavian countries of “paralyzing” cooperation, along with Norway, Finland, and Sweden. The Barents withdrew from the European Arctic Council. In February 2023, Russia revised its Arctic policy and emphasized new alliances with other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries, especially China. That same month, it also suspended participation in New START, the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia.
“There is a post-Cold War political idea called ‘Arctic exceptionalism,’ in which the Arctic is excluded from the development of world politics,” said Rasmus Bertelsen, Barents professor of political science at the Arctic University in Tromsø. “The problem is, it was never effective.”
If you look a little more closely at the past few decades, you’ll see that Russia’s Arctic strategy closely follows global challenges, Bertelsen said. In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference firmly rejected the post-Cold War stable world order led by the United States. In the same year, Russia launched its first cyberattack against Estonia and boldly claimed its Arctic territory by planting a Russian flag on the ocean floor beneath the North Pole. Putin has also focused militarization around the northern highlands. Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, it has steadily built up its Northern Fleet, which consists of nuclear submarines, surface ships, missile facilities, air fleets, and radar stations. Currently, Russia’s largest military base is on the Kola Peninsula, which borders Norway and Finland, where it is also testing new hypersonic missiles and nuclear torpedo drones. Approximately 80% of Russia’s northern ground forces have been sent to Ukraine, but air and sea forces remain intact.
“Russia has previously been interested in what appears to be a constructive partner, including in the Arctic,” said Andreas Ostergen, a senior researcher at the Arctic Institute in Oslo, Norway. “As in other parts of the world, the situation is deteriorating.”
Russia’s full-scale invasion was carried out as a wake-up call to its Scandinavian neighbors, which had resisted the military alliance for decades. Suddenly, neutrality began to look more fragile. Finland has seen a particularly startling reversal, with 51 percent of Finns opposing NATO membership as of December 2021. Currently, 78% support their membership. This alliance comes with the promise of U.S. military power. In 2023, Finland and Sweden signed a bilateral military agreement with the United States, allowing them to station American personnel and weapons at dozens of bases, including nine in the Arctic. Norway has been an active member of NATO since its founding and already has several bases that allow the stationing of U.S. personnel and weapons. Yet, since the Cold War, Norway has had a “reassurance” policy that limits the presence of NATO and its allies beyond the 28 degrees longitude zone, which is close to Russia. It is currently unclear whether that policy will remain in place.
Since 2009, Nordic Defense Cooperation has been coordinating Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland on their national military policies. In 2022, Norway, Finland and Sweden announced an agreement to strengthen the alliance with a focus on the Northern Highlands. Currently, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland are in talks about formal sharing of airpower. In March 2024, an expanded “Nordic Ready” exercise, led by Norway, will be held to test the cooperative defense plans of these countries. Michael Pohl, a senior security policy fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said history would show the new Nordic alliance to be “one of Putin’s biggest mistakes”. .
“If the war in Ukraine has achieved anything, it’s brought us into line with the Nordic countries on security,” Paul said. “We want to divide our enemies, not unite them against each other.”
Mr. Ferguson sees the US military bases in Sweden and Finland as mutually beneficial. Despite the United States’ resources, it often lacks technical expertise in extreme situations. These small countries have much to teach the U.S. military, she said. And the alliance with NATO is a “game changer,” she said.
“Right now, seven of the eight countries in the Arctic are aligned with geopolitically very capable militaries,” Ferguson said. “I don’t know if there is such a concentration of coordination and capabilities between nations anywhere else in the world.”
Still, Ferguson stressed that this is all in the name of deterrence. And experts agree that a full-scale northern conflict is unlikely. Paradoxically, Russia’s vast military and economic resources that increase tensions in the Arctic are also preventing them from actually escalating, Paul noted. In the north, Russia has too much to lose. Its vast territory and vast fossil fuel resources are both important factors in asserting its identity as a global superpower. And that, unlike in the cases of Ukraine and Crimea, Putin has never publicly imagined taking back Finland, which declared independence from Russia in 1917, and even talked about accessing the Atlantic via Norway. There was no. Paul said the Kremlin was interested in maintaining a “low level of tension” in the north.
For now, that means hybrid warfare, or “gray zone” tactics that are difficult to track and identify. For example, in November 2023, after Finland became the first neighboring country to close its borders with Russia due to a huge surge in asylum seekers, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orupo called the move the “instrumentalization of migration.” . In other words, it is retaliation for joining NATO. (Russia denied the charges.)
At sea, potential aggression is even more difficult to track. In April 2021 and January 2022, fiber optic cables connecting Svalbard and mainland Norway were mysteriously cut. Ship tracking data later revealed that in both cases, Russian fishing vessels had repeatedly passed over the cables before the damage occurred. In October 2023, a Chinese container ship new new polar bear It damaged a gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea before entering Russian territorial waters. Finland’s National Investigation Agency said the damage was likely caused by the ship’s severed anchor, but experts are still debating whether the damage was intentional. Proving malicious intent is extremely difficult and investigations are ongoing.
“This is one of the key questions being asked right now: How do we defend against attacks on critical infrastructure under the sea?” at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Polar Institute in Washington, DC. Said Marisol Maddox, Senior Arctic Analyst: The lesson Russia is learning at this point is that they can get away with this problem. ”
The effects of such infrastructure damage, whether intentional or not, can be far-reaching and long-lasting. For example, a fiber optic cable that was damaged in April 2021 was not identified and repaired until November of the same year. Fortunately, one more undersea cable remained to keep the lights on in Svalbard. But without that redundancy, thousands of people could have been stranded without power for months. Mr Maddox said this kind of vulnerability would be very concerning in the event of an overt conflict.
In highly militarized areas, mistakes can carry the highest risk. For Ostergen, “miscalculations and misunderstandings” are “the greatest security risk in the North Atlantic Arctic.” In the region, both Russia and NATO frequently conduct military exercises and rehearse the mobilization of their troops and fleets. These daily rehearsals are especially necessary in cold regions and require cold-resistant equipment and techniques. (In particular, Ostergen emphasized that Russia is simulating direct attacks on neighboring countries, while NATO is strictly simulating defensive strategies.) But these are complex operations; In many cases, this means trying out people and procedures for the first time. All you need to rehearse the opening of a military theater is one accidentally discharged firearm and one crosshair. Typically, such exercises are clearly communicated and coordinated across borders. However, recently this communication has become problematic.
“Paradoxically, since February 2022, the possibility of dialogue has disappeared while the tension and fear of something happening has increased,” Ostergen said. “This is the most troubling aspect of it all.”
And where will this war, whether hybrid or explicit, end? In the worst case, the current war in Ukraine could end with a northern attack. Russia has 11 submarines capable of launching long-range nuclear weapons. Eight of them live on the Kola Peninsula. For this reason alone, the Arctic carries special weight for world leaders who must consider escalation to absolute hypothetical objectives.
Still, Paul stressed that any form of Arctic conflict remains against Russia’s interests and is less likely than in other parts of the world. Still, he cautioned against assuming that Putin would act rationally. It is unclear how he will react if he is cornered by the expansion of NATO and the advance of Ukrainian forces. But one fact remains that Arctic countries cannot easily forget. That means the rest of his military power is concentrated in the north.
“President Putin made a big mistake in Ukraine,” Paul said. “He may find another success in the North Pole.”