March 2017. Russian President Vladimir Putin visits Franz Josef Land, a Russian archipelago made up of 191 ice-covered islands located at a latitude of 80ºN, in the Arctic Ocean, northwest of Nova Zembla and east of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. A portion of the “country of the white death”, as the legendary Russian explorer Valerian Albanov defined this region. Desolation inhabits this territory of 16,134 square kilometers dotted with some military and scientific bases. The leader – stern, spirited, wrapped in a superb red parka that protects him from the daggers of the cold – is accompanied by two of his faithful: the then prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev (currently vice-president of the Russian Security Council, his destiny always stapled to the of the chief), and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. The occasion is special: the inauguration of the Arkticheski Trilistnik (the Arctic Clover) base, a 14,000-square-meter complex that looks like a space station, with a crew of 150 men trained for war in their camouflage outfit and white Kalashnikovs , sleds pulled by dogs or reindeer, a heated runway for a flotilla of MiG-31 fighters and Su-34 bombers, armored vehicles and the latest technology in control panels and radars. Russian Expansion Putin’s gaze matches the icy surroundings as he, swollen by the historic moment, utters these words: “We are back. We can state with absolute certainty that our power and opportunities will grow with the Russian expansion in the Arctic. Our future depends on this region. We must stand against NATO threats at our doorsteps, we are here to protect our families and wealth. This is Russian territory; Unlike others, we do not build bases in foreign countries. We must guarantee the safety of the new polar routes and the extraction plants. We are here to assert Russian sovereignty in this sea.” Since then, the remote Franz Josef Land has been known as the ‘Putin Archipelago’. The event was collected by the Italian journalist Marzio G. Mian in a devastating book: ‘Artico. The battle for the Great North’ (Ariel, 2019), actually a two-hundred-page report that “reveals the hypocrisy and arrogance of our civilization” -according to the author himself- and that it is difficult to leave someone indifferent. More after what has happened in Europe in 2022. Those words and attitude of Putin, transferred to the world that we live five years later, are familiar to us. The Russian president now has his eyes on Ukraine, but his ambition goes further. The Arctic, that mysterious border for Europeans, scene of epic and tragedy, has become the operations board of a greedy geopolitics, encouraged by the configuration of a new cartography: the Great North is no longer an icy region resistant to explorers, a void, a sea that separates instead of uniting its coastlines, an anti-Mediterranean from the point of view of the history of human relations, as geographer Eduardo Martínez de Pisón describes it. Desktop Code Image for mobile, amp and app Mobile Code AMP Code 1900 APP Code The surface of the frozen ocean was 8 million square kilometers in 1970. Half a century later it has been reduced by more than half. This melting provides access to a staggering bounty: 40 percent of the world’s fossil fuel reserves (30 percent of all natural resources) is now within reach of the United States, China, Norway… and, of course, Russia of course. The IAS Snowflake scientific station that Moscow will build in the extreme north of the Urals will focus on studying the opportunities that climate change could provide for the exploitation of resources in the Arctic. Not so long ago, Greenland was the Moon. And suddenly, its deposits of uranium and rare earths – chemical elements essential for mobile phones, fiber optics and military technology – could turn it into a Congo borealis. Managers of mining companies are cynically of the opinion that if the island wants independence from Denmark “it has no choice but to open this fucking safe” (this argument is extensively developed in the last season of the series ‘Borgen’). The melting of ice has opened up new commercial and tourist routes – the once-terrifying Northwest Passage is already in the catalog of some cruise companies – and exposed fishing grounds. Technological autarky International analysts warn that the war in Ukraine should not distract the attention of the West from the Arctic front, a chapter in the plot that develops in parallel, both in its economic and military aspects. The Tsentralno-Olginskaya 1 platform, the northernmost in the Russian Arctic, in the Laptev Sea, has been drilling 5,000 meters under the ice for five years with a technology capable of drilling underwater rock to suck out the 10,000 million tons of oil that the area guards like a treasure. The sanctions from the time of the Russian invasion of Crimea, corrected and increased in these times of anxiety, have not made a dent on this front. The withdrawal of Western support from the great energy giants of the post-Soviet economy – Gazprom, Rosneft and Novatek – has hurt firms like the US Exxon Mobil, whose contracts have remained a dead letter, more than those mentioned above. Related News standard interview Si Bill Browder: “Putin is the leader of a criminal organization” Gerard Bono In ‘Embargo Order’, his latest book, he recounts international conspiracies, espionage and hidden circles of power in the first person “Instead of strangling the pipelines, the sanctions have allowed Russia to take giant steps in the sector, by acquiring a technological self-sufficiency capable of generating profits”, explains Marzio G. Mian in his essay. “We are like an avalanche,” Sergei Vakulenko, from Gazprom’s strategy and innovation department, confessed to the Italian journalist. In the 600 wells they control, they were able to extract, in the 2013-2016 period, twice as much as all the OPEC countries combined. In fact, there is a kind of Saudi Arabia in the Great North: Khanty-Mansi, in Western Siberia, a region the size of France whose crude oil production reaches 240 million tons in some years. Of those powders, these sludge: nobody doubts that Moscow is winning the energy battle derived from the Ukrainian crisis. Almost all Russian gas production comes from the Arctic, with a reserve of 43 trillion cubic meters and a potential of 73 trillion extractable. 85% of it is extracted in the Yamal peninsula, in northwestern Siberia, where a gigantic port has been built that has cost almost 30,000 million euros (12,000 million have been paid by China). The militaristic escalation in the region has been investigated by the Norwegian journalist Thomas Nilsen, editor of the digital ‘The Barents Observer’, which has become a reference medium for explaining Russia’s movements in the region. Nilsen is not the most popular guy in the Kremlin, which has him in his crosshairs. He has investigated, for example, the Kola Peninsula, where there are four bases that store atomic arsenals at the gates of Norway and Finland, with secret deposits that do not appear on the maps. The rush of Sweden and Finland to join NATO, which has been deploying troops in northern Europe for years, seems fully justified. “The world wants to bite something from us, but we are going to rip everyone’s teeth out,” Putin warned at the Arctic Council meeting held a year ago in Reykjavik. While icebergs break off from the ice cap (“Bursts and roars tear apart the silence and announce the collapse of entire walls, cliffs that sink causing small tsunamis and the excitement of thousands of birds,” Mian poetically describes), Russia is gearing up for the ‘white war’, perhaps the next to break out before the Ukrainian embers finish going out.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism