In the eerie ice of an Arctic sunrise, 20 US Marines are preparing for a war on the ice. Clad in white snow camouflage and cross-country skis, they careen awkwardly between positions on the Blåtindan mountainside in the far north of Norway, surveilling a simulated enemy on the snow-laden peak. The second force reconnaissance company — an elite team that travels ahead of other forces, sending intelligence back to command and control — is expert in operating stealthily. But in this terrain they appear exposed, unwieldy. Heavy backpacks skew their balance, adding dangerous momentum to downhill stretches and unwelcome weight on the upward hike.
Nils, their Norwegian trainer, has spent a decade in the army, and now leads his own long-range reconnaissance patrol. He looks on from a concrete command post as one Marine topples sideways by a distant ridge, then another. The fallen men are smudges on the monochrome landscape, prone and indistinct against black pines and white snow. Nils watches them struggle to their feet. “The most important thing for them to experience,” he says, “is how difficult this is.”
In the depths of the cold war, US soldiers were a familiar sight in Norwegian garrison towns north of the Arctic Circle, but, in the decades after the break-up of the Soviet Union, they retreated. As hostilities with Russia have grown, they are back once again to learn how to fight in this inhospitable terrain. This spring, the Norwegian armed forces are training nearly 8,000 Nato troops in the art of cold-weather warfare.
Tensions in the Arctic are rising, as melting sea ice opens a new maritime passage across the North Pole, triggering a race to access mineral belts exposed by warming oceans. Russia is seeking to exploit the Northern Sea Route — a 5,600km-long passage connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans via the ice-bound seas on Russia’s northern coastline. At the same time, it is jealously guarding the waters around the Kola peninsula, home to its largest naval unit, the Northern Fleet, and, most prized of all, its ballistic missile submarines and nuclear warhead storage facilities. Over the past few years, Moscow has intensively militarised the region, reactivating cold war naval bases along its northern Barents Sea coast (see map, below). It has also reconstituted its Soviet-era Leningrad military district, a force intended to bolster its strength in north-west Russia, near the borders with Finland and Norway. It is not the only great power moving in the region. China has invested heavily in Arctic energy exploration and is building its military capabilities, including through a series of joint exercises with Russia over the past year.
While conflict in the Arctic might seem a remote prospect given the intensity of Russia’s war in Ukraine, it is striking that Moscow has preserved its Northern Fleet even as its land forces have been heavily denuded on the battlefield. US Vice-Admiral Douglas G Perry, who commands the Nato naval headquarters in charge of security in the north Atlantic and Arctic, warns that Russia has “significantly increased” its military presence in the High North over the past few years. The war in Ukraine only reinforces that Nato allies need to be capable across the “entire Arctic geography . . . to defend our collective nations against capabilities that can be pretty threatening”, Perry says. An end to the conflict in Ukraine will only intensify Russia’s military focus in the Arctic.
Still, Moscow, which feels a strong ownership over its corner of the Arctic, faces increasing competition. Donald Trump, citing security concerns, is trying to claim Greenland as US territory. Vladimir Putin warned last week that Russia would further increase its troops in the region. Europe cannot risk being unprepared. “You may not get to choose where you have to fight,” says one senior European military leader. “And that means having a core competence in Arctic warfare.” Soldiering here, he adds, is “just 10 per cent tactics, and 90 per cent survival”.
Norwegian veterans of cold-weather combat like to list the armies through history that have been felled on contact with Arctic conditions. Napoleon’s forces suffered a deadly retreat from Moscow in 1812 when it reached -37C and men toppled and died of exposure while marching, blood streaming from their mouths. Over a century later, Hitler’s ill-equipped Wehrmacht troops were stalled as fuel froze in their vehicles, stymied by grounded air cover and eventually defeated on approach to the Russian capital during the winter of 1941.
On Blåtindan, where the surveillance exercise is taking place, the US Marines are relearning these hard lessons. In late January, there is only about six hours of daylight, so most of their work is carried out in a dusky twilight. After their exercises they are cold, shaky-legged and bruised from falling on frozen snow. The wind soars east across the hillside, searing skin and scorching throats. Sebastian Romeo, 30, pokes his balaclava out of his eyes and shifts his backpack. “They say Norwegians are born on skis, but I was born with a hockey stick in my hand,” he says, making light of his struggles to stay upright on the ice-encrusted snow.
The Marine, originally from Philadelphia, has been deployed in the Gulf, the Mediterranean and the Middle East in his eight-year career. Training here is the furthest possible contrast from dusty campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the geopolitical axis has shifted; it is time to tackle a new domain. “There’s stuff they just know in their bones,” he says of the Norwegians, “and we have to learn it.” Girding himself for the next manoeuvre, he pulls his mittens up. “This is all preparation, I guess, for the worst night of your life.”
You cannot tell whether it is night or day in Norway’s military headquarters, a bunker carved deep into the mountains east of Bodø, but there is one appointment each week the team here will never miss. At 2pm every Wednesday, they test the line to the head of Russia’s Northern Fleet with a brief call, to maintain communication in the event of an accident or incident that requires de-escalation.
Norway’s relationship with Russia has always been unusual among Nato members. The two countries share a 197km-long border, which requires mutual management, and the sheer hostility of Arctic conditions has bred a necessary co-operation, even between adversaries. The theory is that a conflict of any kind here would be so catastrophic that emergency back-channels with Moscow have to be maintained at all costs. “High North, low tension” has been Norway’s aspiration since the end of the cold war, but the phrase rings increasingly hollow.
While Norwegian armed forces cut contact with their Russian peers after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and reduced communications further after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, the weekly test call endured. Relations with the Russians are, according to Vice-Admiral Rune Andersen, chief of the Norwegian Joint Headquarters, “professional and focused”. The two sides wish each other a Happy Christmas in a typed message across their line. “We think it’s important to have the possibility [of contact],” Andersen says. “It has to do with safety. And I think they see it the same way.”
Life in the Bodø headquarters is so distant from the world outside that it feels unearthly, as if you are on a submarine or suspended in space. Entering the cold war-era facility requires passing through a portal of sorts, a passage bored through the quartz mountain. Designed to withstand a nuclear attack, the door is built at 90 degrees to the tunnel, allowing the blast from an explosion to travel through the mountain, bypassing the infrastructure within. The air is filtered to guard against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear penetration. Up several flights of stairs and along dizzying, brightly lit corridors lies the joint operations centre, where military personnel monitor activity across Norway’s land, sea and airspace 24 hours a day.
They use radar, satellites, underwater sensors and intelligence collected by the coastguard and maritime surveillance aircraft to track Russian ships and submarines entering the Norwegian Sea. Many are headed towards the waters between Greenland, Iceland and the UK — the so-called GIUK gap — which forms a gateway to the north Atlantic. This has always been a Rubicon for Nato allies. If Russian submarines are able to pass through this junction undetected, they could potentially target missiles at capitals across Europe and from there cross the Atlantic to threaten America’s eastern seaboard.
Efforts to monitor these vessels first stepped up around 2018, when Norway, the US and UK noticed Russia testing new submarine capabilities and what Andersen calls an “increased operational tempo” by Northern Fleet submarines and ships into the north Atlantic. The commander is a tall man of grave intensity, who speaks quietly and weighs each word. Since the movement of submarines is considered highly classified, he refuses to comment on current activity, but suggests that the uptick in deployments has stabilised. “It’s part of the new dynamics. This is a competition for control,” he says. “It’s not going away.”
The reason the Arctic is so combustible, Andersen says, is because even though war is unlikely to start in this region, conflict that originates in eastern Europe or the Baltics can easily spread north. “You see it already now in Ukraine, that a war does not only have a front, it happens also in the deeper ends of the countries,” he explains. Russia flies aircraft from its Olenegorsk air base on the Kola peninsula, well inside the Arctic Circle, to strike targets in Ukraine, for example. And Kyiv has hit back, sending drones to damage jets at the air base. “The most likely scenario is that a conflict starts elsewhere, and then transcends into the Arctic,” Andersen says. “Because of the bases here, because of the capabilities here, because the western response will be broad and strong.”
Arctic supremacy
This is the fourth in a multipart series about the emerging global contest for dominance in the Arctic. Melting ice will create new challenges and opportunities, which the FT has dispatched reporters to cover first-hand. Read more at ft.com/arctic
Part one: How Greenland got caught in a clash of superpowers
Part two: 10 days with the US Coast Guard on the new Arctic front lines
Part three: Canada races to secure its Arctic frontier
Andersen, who graduated from the Norwegian naval academy just as cold-war hostilities were thawing, has seen the full spectrum of relations though his career. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, there were port visits and even joint naval exercises between Norway and Russia. “We, as western countries, gravitate towards co-operation,” he says. “We were optimistic about the development [of peaceful relations] during the 1990s.” The central corridor in the Bodø headquarters is lined with cabinets displaying presents received from Russian naval captains during the period of détente: a glass Kalashnikov filled with vodka (the seal unbroken), a matryoshka doll with lavishly painted eyelashes and pursed, rosebud lips.
Over a lunch of venison stew and mashed potato in the canteen, Andersen reflects that now, “realism has returned” to Oslo’s dealings with Moscow. “The 1990s and all the friendliness that came with it, that’s bygones.” For his officers, this means slow, patient work in the joint operations room, watching ships that are trying to hide their position or manoeuvring in a way that seems unusual. Norwegian personnel will send a ship or aircraft to shadow suspicious-looking vessels before sharing the resulting intelligence with allies. “This is constant vigilance in pursuit of situational awareness,” Andersen says. “We do not want to act, but we want to know where the Russians are.”
The Marines second force reconnaissance company is back on Blåtindan practising for the worst: that covert surveillance fails and they are forced to engage with the enemy. The hostile troops are represented as targets, which pop up randomly on the mountainside in a spray of powder. The men, juggling ski pole and rifle, drop down to one knee for stability and to take aim. When each enemy position is revealed, the commander shouts orders, his breath clouding the air. He is answered by bursts of gunfire, echoes deadened by snow. The men edge slowly upwards, in formation across a broad plain. Since there is no vegetation to hide in, the Marines must learn how to engage the adversary from further away. Their usual drills will not work here, and even familiar weapons become cumbersome, sensitivity on the rifle trigger dampened through two pairs of gloves and bulky waterproof over-mittens.
Nils whistles, and the Marines traipse to a hut on the mountainside to debrief, leaving their skis planted upright in the snow. One man, who has sprained his knee, limps between two comrades. Inside, the Marines collapse wearily on to benches lining the walls. The bunker smells of pine and woodsmoke. Over Norwegian chocolate bars decorated with woodland animals, they enumerate the difficulties: they can’t all see the targets; they are struggling to hear commands; when they slip over, their rifles are getting stuck in the snow.
This company is usually deployed at sea — storming boats to seize contraband or diving underneath them to gather intelligence — and has trained in both swamp and jungle. But this Arctic terrain, they say, is the one that works hardest against you. As they reload their weapons, snow starts to fall outside, blurring the gap between sky and tree line. Staff sergeant Tim Rudderham reminds his team that he, too, is unused to the conditions. “If you see the commander laid out flat, you’ve got to take over,” he urges them. “You’ve got to step up.”
While tracking Moscow’s military movements has been the work of decades, understanding Beijing’s ambitions in the region is a more recent enterprise. China, which is not a member of the eight-nation Arctic Council, has nevertheless declared itself a “near-Arctic state”. This is partly so it can exploit the promise of the Northern Sea Route. The NSR is currently impassable for large parts of the year. But according to climate scientists, by 2050 it will be reliably ice-free in September and year-round by 2100, cutting the journey time from Asia to Europe by nearly one-third, by avoiding the chokepoint of Suez.
Even though the NSR lies in the international waters of Russia’s Exclusive Economic Zone, Moscow claims it as sovereign territory and declared in 2022 that no vessel could pass through it without prior approval. Last May, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced a joint commission for the development of the route, which will form part of Beijing’s “polar silk road”. Russia is now investing in technology that will allow easier tracking of traffic through the route. One British intelligence official likens it to a “21st-century equivalent of the Suez Canal”, a critical maritime passage ripe for future conflict.
At the moment, China’s primary interests in the Arctic are economic. China National Petroleum Corporation and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation own partial stakes in Russia’s biggest liquefied natural gas developments, Arctic 2 and Yamal. The number of new companies with Chinese ownership registered to operate in the Arctic and NSR-adjacent regions has increased, from 48 in 2020 to 123 in the first six months of 2023 alone, according to research by the Strider Institute.
But there have been increasing signs that China is also gearing up its military operations. Two years ago, China’s coastguard and Russia’s FSB Border Guard Service, a branch of its domestic intelligence agency, agreed to greater co-operation in Arctic waters. Last year, the two countries held a joint coastguard patrol in the Bering Strait in the Alaskan Arctic, which is set to be an annual exercise. Most significantly, Moscow and Beijing conducted their first-ever joint strategic bomber patrol over the Bering Strait last July, a move described by Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowski as “unprecedented provocation by our adversaries”.
Russia has historically tried to exclude competitors and non-Arctic countries from the region, and has so far restricted its joint operations with China to the North American side of the Arctic, as far as possible from its sensitive military assets on the Kola peninsula. Nevertheless, the view among western military and intelligence officials interviewed for this article is that even if Moscow is wary of allowing Beijing a foothold in the area, its dependence on the Asian superpower has grown as a result of its war in Ukraine. China will likely seek to recoup this debt in the Arctic by way of investment opportunities and access for its armed forces, the officials say.
While it is too early to understand the nature and extent of the co-operation between Russia and China, Nato is watching closely. A representative from the Danish Defence Intelligence Service told the FT it considers that China has “long-term military strategic interests” in the Arctic and is likely to be trying to establish presence there, “for instance with strategic missile submarines under the ice cap, to ensure its strategic deterrence”. In other words, Beijing aspires to operate covertly under the ice and eventually target nuclear weapons at Europe and the US.
China is already normalising its activities in the Arctic, mainly through scientific research and exploration, although there is evidence that this research may have dual purposes. There are particular concerns about China’s Yellow River research station in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago high in the Arctic Ocean, 930km north of the mainland. US Congress members on the Chinese Communist Party Select Committee warned that some Chinese personnel working at Yellow River were affiliated with a military company and had used data collected there to study missile-guidance technology. China also has a research laboratory in Kárhóll, northern Iceland, which, according to the committee, “appears to perform dual-use research” on Nato territory.
Beijing cites climate and weather research as the primary justification for investing in icebreaker vessels but these, too, could have military uses. Last summer, China’s Xue Long 2 icebreaker reportedly docked for the first time in Murmansk, the largest Russian port in the north of the Kola peninsula. Beijing currently has five polar icebreakers and is working on developing larger ships, including one 30,000-tonne nuclear-powered icebreaker, which is projected to cost a billion yuan (€134mn). A record three Chinese research icebreakers were identified as being active in the Arctic last year.
Mike Sfraga, the US’s first and only Arctic ambassador, appointed under the Biden administration, admits he is anxious about Beijing’s aspirations. Having resigned his post when Trump entered the White House, he is now based in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the increased military signalling between Moscow and Beijing feels uncomfortably close. “Since 2022, we’ve witnessed a dramatic increase in Sino-Russian military co-operation in the Arctic,” he says, a development he refuses to dismiss as “simply posturing”. Sfraga argues that China’s aspirations to being a true military power will only be realised if its navy can gain critical operational experience in ice-covered seas. “I don’t know if China will ever have a permanent presence in the Arctic,” he says. But he suggests that Beijing already has “significant capacity” to disrupt Nato satellite communications and critical undersea infrastructure. He also suggests that research facilities such as Yellow River can be equipped to gather signals intelligence.
The next objective for Beijing is to test its troops in this environment, just as Nato forces are doing in Norway. The Arctic waters are, according to one former naval oceanographer, simply the hardest seas in which to fight. Metal suffers embrittlement at low temperatures, weapons freeze and thaw, gathering moisture, which causes rust and degradation. The closer to the North Pole you are, the harder it is to navigate as the Earth’s converging magnetic fields send compass needles awry. Navigation is made even more difficult by GPS satellites, which are at a lower elevation in the polar regions, being frequently occluded by terrain. There are lessons the military learns only through experience. When the US navy sent its $4.5bn Harry S Truman aircraft carrier to the Arctic Circle in 2018, the captain unearthed a decades-old navy operations manual that suggested baseball bats were the best means of removing ice from the deck. He duly ordered 48 Louisville Sluggers for the voyage.
Marc Lanteigne, a China specialist at Norway’s Arctic University in Tromsø, does not question Beijing’s interest in the region but is sceptical it is building a meaningful alliance with Russia. “Yes, there have been considerable numbers of swaggering or show-boating operations,” he says. “Where I start to question the situation, though, is how much trust is there between the two countries.” Much of the signalling from Moscow and Beijing is reactive, he suggests, especially since the accession of Arctic countries Sweden and Finland to Nato boosted what Russia sees as the threat on its north-eastern border. China and Russia “are extremely suspicious of Nato aims in the Arctic, and they very much want to jointly put forward the very loud signal that, no, the west is not the only operator there”, he says. “The message is: ‘We are here too, and we’re not going anywhere.’”
At the Setermoen military base, high in the Arctic Circle, Norwegian officers are preparing for the arrival of troops from the US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands for lessons in cold-weather warfare. This training matters: in the event of a conflict here, it is these forces who will scramble to defend the homeland. The hardest job, the Norwegians say, is convincing their peers of how dangerous cold-weather injuries can be and reversing the attitudes that have been established over years of previous military coaching. “Most of the allies are thinking, ‘If you’re cold, suck it up.’ But you can’t do that in winter training, because then you freeze,” one warns. “If you can’t tell that you’re freezing, you will lose fingers.”
The protocol they teach ahead of the outdoor exercises is known in military slang as “Sibir”, Siberia in Norwegian. The routine includes checking troops’ feet every night for signs of frostbite, pressing a needle point gently all over the sole of the foot to test for loss of sensation. When they are walking in the open, each soldier must turn around every few minutes to study the face of the person behind them. A white dot on their nose, chin or cheekbone is the first sign of frostbite and requires immediate skin-to-skin treatment from an ungloved hand.
Norwegian troops are able to work in the open down to about -20C, but below this, even if the operation does not stop, it takes place far more slowly. Special forces have training in more extreme temperatures, of -30C and below. In these conditions, joints seize, movement is constrained by extra layers of clothing and basic tasks such as setting up camp can take three times as long. The focus shifts decisively from combat to survival. One training officer describes how soldiers must study the environment and learn to shelter from the weather rather than risk exposure to it, to know when to dig a hole in the snow to wait out storm or fog. “You need to be part of nature,” he says, “not fighting it.”
It was zero degrees on the pier with a light easterly wind when, almost exactly a year ago, Russian military officials and shipping executives met at the JSC Admiralty Shipyards in St Petersburg. The keel-laying ceremony inaugurated a new autonomous vessel, the Sergey Bavilin, which is expected to reach depths of 11,000m, nearly twice the intended depth of existing Russian submersibles. It was commissioned by one of Russia’s most secret military departments, Glavnoye Upravlenie Glubokovodnikh Issledovanii, the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, known as GUGI.
Based in the secluded Olenya Guba inlet high on the northern coast of the Kola peninsula, GUGI is responsible for maintaining the network of seabed sensors that warn Russia of approaching enemy submarines. But GUGI is also expert in sabotage, equipped with submersibles which can sink to extreme depths and extend manipulator arms to sever power and communications cables in the Arctic and beyond. GUGI is an agent of mischief that conducts operations at the other end of the conflict spectrum from hypersonic missiles and nuclear weapons. Its operations are covert, deniable and below the threshold of outright war.
The nature of GUGI’s activities means that information about its operations held by western allies is highly classified. Most officials refuse to discuss it altogether. One Nato naval commander described the organisation, which also has expertise in mapping and reconnaissance, as “the premier capability anywhere in the world for operating in deep oceans”. According to the Norwegian intelligence agency, the NIS, GUGI, together with Northern Fleet, has “considerable capacity to threaten Norwegian and western critical underwater infrastructure and energy sectors”. One former Russian naval officer who operated in the Arctic and spoke to the FT on condition of anonymity, said that GUGI worked closely with Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, and had likely been given increased resources since the Ukraine invasion. Satellite imagery analysed by the FT shows that since the war started, GUGI has built up its defences at Olenya Guba to protect its classified assets there from damage or surveillance.
At the ceremony last March, GUGI’s chief, Vladimir Grishechkin, hailed the Sergey Bavilin in terms both crowing and deliberately vague. “The deep-sea vessel that we are laying down today is unique in its class,” he told the assembled dignitaries, according to a press release published on the shipyard’s website. “Only vessels of this class can dive to significant depths to study, develop and perform specific work in the bottom of the world’s ocean.”
At least one aspect of that “specific work” is tampering with the cables on which Europe relies. In November 2021, a section of the underwater cable used by Norway’s Lofoten-Vesterålen Ocean Observatory was ripped out. Soon afterwards, in early 2022, one of the fibreoptic cables connecting Svalbard with the Norwegian mainland was disrupted. Investigations into both these incidents suggested they were probably caused by human activity. GUGI could manage such operations, either by itself or by tasking civilian vessels, according to the Russian former naval officer.
Activities like this suggest that Russia’s risk appetite is rising. Thomas Nilsen, a journalist who edits The Barents Observer, has lived and worked for more than 20 years in Kirkenes, a Norwegian coastal town near the Russian border. “Hybrid actions matter because Russia is preparing for a potential conflict,” he says. “They are testing Norwegian responses. They cut the cable, and then they sit down with popcorn and take notes of how the Norwegians are reacting . . . They take note of it, and they learn from it. And they can then do better preparing for real action in case of an escalating conflict.” GUGI, Nilsen says, illustrates Russia’s military calculation — that a conflict “is not only a question about weapons and shooting and missiles, it is the entire spectrum of harm you can do to enemies”.
Such actions occur not only on the ocean floor, but also at altitude; Nilsen was on an aircraft earlier this year that suffered GPS spoofing. The captain told Nilsen this was part of a pattern of Russian action. The Civil Aviation Authority of Norway reported in 2022 that such jamming incidents by Moscow had intensified following the invasion of Ukraine. In autumn of the same year, Norway arrested a Russian national after drones were spotted flying near offshore oil and gas platforms. Still, to Nilsen’s frustration, Norway is more reticent than its ally Finland in calling out Russian hybrid aggression or making explicit warnings about the scale of the threat.
This is diplomacy on a knife edge, conducted in carefully calibrated statements. “Every war and conflict from now on and into eternity will be a hybrid conflict, and then on top of that, it might also be kinetic,” Norway’s foreign secretary Espen Barth Eide told a conference in Tromsø earlier this year. He admitted that cables are occasionally destroyed by coincidence and electronics do not always work, but asserted: “The early signs that you are moving from peace to war will be in the hybrid domain.”
In Setermoen a new group of Marines, the light armoured reconnaissance battalion, wake early for a lesson on how to drive on the ice. This unit, which traditionally moves ahead of infantry to send intelligence back from the battlefield, forms a convoy, with each driver awaiting his turn on the track. A rising wind whips over the stationary vehicles. Frode, the Norwegian instructor, has insisted they remove their snow chains to further reduce traction. He wants trainees to experience conditions at their most dangerous.
The first vehicle prepares to move. The navigator, sitting high on the turret, sends instructions to the driver over the radio headset. Snow blows in swirling eddies around his head. “Advance,” he says, then: “accelerate.” A growl from the engine sends the tank surging forward across the ice at 20mph, plumes of black smoke tumbling from the exhaust like coal dust. Without warning, the “Brake!” order is given. The vehicle swerves, its rear end swinging round to stop in a snow bank. The wind has died, and there is a half-second of stillness before the engine reawakens, a moment of silence before the roar.
It is in this pause between rest and motion that Nato now finds itself. The dilemma for allies is how to respond to the threats unspooling across the Arctic, a theatre stretching east and west around the pole, from seabed to space. One Nato official admitted frankly that the alliance was “still on a journey” to work out what its posture should be.
Even before he returned to office in late January, Trump further complicated the question by reasserting his ambition to “buy” Greenland, a strategic asset between Russia and the US, whose Pituffik military base hosts early warning systems critical to America’s defence against ballistic missiles. Last week, vice-president JD Vance visited Pituffik to restate US concerns about Arctic security. Denmark has repeatedly said the island is not for sale.
The possibility of joint investment in Arctic energy and transport has also emerged as a discussion point in US negotiations with Russia over Ukraine. After meeting Putin in Moscow last month, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, proposed Russia and the US could be “thinking about how to integrate their energy policies in the Arctic, share sea lanes, maybe send LNG . . . into Europe together”. This has clear benefits for Moscow, which is seeking improved access to European markets for its liquefied natural gas, which has been subject to some sanctions following the full-scale invasion.
In the UK, military leaders, jolted into action by the growing instability, agreed a new defence pact with Norway earlier this year to bolster Arctic security. The British armed forces have only one ice-capable vessel, the ageing HMS Protector. Ahead of an upcoming strategic defence review, naval chiefs have requested two new vessels to replace her, according to officials familiar with the plans. Whether Britain, either alone or with allies, should challenge Russia’s claims to sovereignty on the NSR by conducting a freedom of navigation exercise there, is a matter of ongoing debate. It would be guaranteed to provoke a reaction. British military chiefs put forward proposals for two such operations in 2019 and 2021, according to three people familiar with the discussions. These operations never took place, but the issue is likely to be reconsidered in future, one person told the FT.
Maritime experts including the UK’s former naval attaché to Moscow, Captain David Fields, have consistently advised against freedom of navigation in the High North, suggesting the risk of escalation is too high and warning about the threat of accident or breakdown in remote, treacherous waters, requiring Russian assistance. The US has also considered conducting a similar expedition in the Kara Sea, north of Russia, accompanied by as many as four guided-missile destroyers and supply vessels, according to a leaked Pentagon document seen by the Wall Street Journal two years ago.
Both nations have, so far, chosen restraint, but the tension between action and inaction persists. Norway has not commented publicly on whether it would condone, let alone take part in, a joint exercise to confront Russia. The foreign ministry is still mulling over whether to lift the self-imposed restrictions that limit allied military exercises in Norway’s northern Finnmark region, on the Russian border, on the basis that it dare not provoke Moscow here. For Nilsen, the persistence of this policy reflects a denial of reality. “There is a saying here: ‘Sitt stille i båten, stormen vil gå over’ (Sit still in your boat, the storm will blow over),” he says. “This is Norway’s attitude towards Russia.”
In the valley below Blåtindan, the Marines’ head torches glow in the half-dark. The second force reconnaissance company has spent the night four to a tent at a temperature of -12C and risen early to melt snow for the water they use in breakfast pouches of chocolate porridge. Every action is deliberate, studied, exhaustingly unfamiliar. They must brush the snow off every surface before bringing it into the tent, to reduce moisture. They sleep with their weapons beside them, so the inner mechanics do not freeze. They must not touch metal with a bare hand, or risk a cold burn. Even their underwear, an insulating wool mesh, has been ordered from Norwegian military suppliers. As they dismantle the camp, they leave behind the outlines of ground sheets with a trench at one end, deep enough to stand and dress. They fill the hole with snow and scuff the imprint with shovels. All traces of their visit will be gone by the next snowfall.
The reconnaissance company has more exercises ahead: a 15-day ski march across challenging terrain, training in crossing frozen rivers, avalanche rescue. The marines will be shown how to dig out a bivouac from the snow, build a fire on a base of wet wood, huddle in a sleeping bag and surveil the enemy through a spotting scope extended beyond a concealed tent opening. They are learning observation the Norwegian way — a nation eyeing its adversary from planes, from ships, from submarines, at border posts, on screens rigged deep in a mountainside bunker and out here, in the open, from frozen dugouts. “Keep things steady, no sharp turns” is Commander Andersen’s guiding principle. “Events have to be level and predictable,” he says. “We are going to have that border with Russia forever.” Schooled in vigilance, they watch, and wait.
(Editor’s note: Nils and Frode are pseudonyms to protect the soldiers’ identities.)
Helen Warrell is an investigative reporter at the FT. Additional reporting by Daria Mosolova in London
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram
