A Norwegian citizen has never lived in the Norwegian town of Barentsburg.
Almost all of its inhabitants are Ukrainian or Russian miners, and practically none of them last more than two years.
The settlement, one of the coldest and most remote in all of Europe, is going through its lowest hours since it was founded in 1920 by a group of Dutch.
There is a lack of buyers for its tons of coal and its tourism sector is in ruins: first, the pandemic;
and now, a boycott over the war in Ukraine.
"These are not easy times," admits Sergei Guschin, the Russian consul general in Barentsburg.
“We do the best we can,” he continues.
Barentsburg is governed by the company of Soviet origin that bought the land in the early thirties of the last century, and which only operates in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, one of the most unpopulated areas on the planet, some 1,000 kilometers south of the Pole. North.
A 1920 treaty recognized Norway's sovereignty, but the signatory countries, including Russia, have the right to exploit the mineral resources of the islands, to fish in their cod grounds and to develop scientific activities.
Sergei Guschin, on April 20 at the Russian Consulate in Barentsburg. Luis Manuel Rivas
In Barentsburg only Russian is spoken.
Everything, except for the consulate building, belongs to Arctikugol: the hotel, the nursery school, the school, the dilapidated wooden buildings with more than a meter of snow accumulated in front of the entrance door, the indoor swimming pool that has been under construction for years, the Soviet-style residential buildings, the food store, or the bust of Lenin exposed in a square.
And of course the coal mine.
“It is the CEO of Arctikugol who decides everything about any matter here.
He lives in Moscow, but he comes every month, ”explains Guschin in the northernmost legation on the planet, and the only one located in a town with less than 500 inhabitants.
There is no police, public order functions are carried out by the mine rescue unit.
“If someone gets drunk and becomes violent,
Guschin, 50, with long hair tied back in a ponytail, points out that the majority of the inhabitants are Ukrainians, "especially from the [self-proclaimed and not internationally recognized] republics of Donetsk and Luhansk," in the Donbas region, where militias pro-Russian women have controlled part of the territory since 2014. The diplomat assures that there are also quite a few families from kyiv, Kharkov and other areas of Ukraine, and stresses that since the beginning of the “conflict” – which he avoids defining as a war – there has been no Ukrainian who wanted to quit his job at the mine.
The consul, who is also a subdeacon of the Russian Orthodox Church, remains faithful to the Kremlin's discourse: he considers that Russia is fighting "to put an end to the Nazis and the Nazi ideology that is deeply rooted in Ukrainian society and its army".
Guschin mentions that the invasion of Ukraine caused “some discussions on social networks”, but that coexistence in Barentsburg has not been affected in any way.
The consular attaché, Muradbek Abakarov, 24, details that in recent weeks they have helped some Ukrainian parents to "bring their children from the regions where combat operations are carried out", facilitating the necessary documentation so that minors could cross into Poland and fly to Svalbard.
Arctikugol is a profoundly loss-making company.
“He loses a lot of money every week,” admits Guschin.
Of the 120,000 tons of coal that are extracted annually, more than 25% is burned there, to produce electricity and heat the houses in which just over 300 people now reside.
And in August the EU embargo on Russian coal will come into force.
"Our goal now is to sell as much as possible as soon as possible," admits Guschin.
Revenues are limited and costs are enormous for a mine with such low output.
Employees hired in Donbas or Russia are flown to Longyearbyen, the main town in Svalbard, and from there by helicopter to Barentsburg.
The restrictions due to the pandemic and the subsequent ban on Russian airlines complicate things.
"They basically come for money," Guschin acknowledges.
Arctikugol pays for transportation and accommodation, and for the tiny hospital or school.
The public company also offers workers and their families ballet, classical dance or yoga courses.
And quite a few kinds of sports that the consul lists with pleasure: “football, volleyball, basketball, table tennis, badminton, chess”.
"There is also a boxing club," interrupts Abakarov,
“The conditions here are complicated.
The work is very hard”, summarizes Guschin, who during his stay at the Russian Embassy in Reykjavík perfected the Icelandic that he decided to learn during his youth.
The mines of Svalbard do not have a good reputation in the guild.
In Barentsburg, the only one of the Russians that is still active, there have been at least five fatal accidents in the last four decades.
Four helicopters from Arctikugol also did not reach their destination.
And in 1996, a plane that covered the route between Moscow and Longyearbyen ended up crashed on a mountain in the Norwegian archipelago, in the worst aviation accident in the history of the Scandinavian country;
All 141 passengers on board died, most of them Ukrainians en route to Pyramiden, another Russian mining settlement that was suddenly abandoned, in 1998.
The years leading up to the pandemic were prosperous for Barentsburg.
Arctikugol hired in 2014 a new manager for the tourism department.
With the arrival of Timofei Rogokhin, the place underwent a transformation: the hotel was renovated, a hostel was opened and more Russian tourists arrived than ever.
From three employees, they became 80. The future of Arctikugol was less dark thanks to the arrival of Rogojín;
but there was something about him that the consul did not like at all: the person in charge of tourism in Barentsburg was critical of President Vladimir Putin, the Russian oligarchs and the repression of anti-government demonstrations.
Guschin informed Moscow, and the director general of Arctikugol called Rogojin to warn him that he had to change his mind if he wanted to continue working in a state company.
But he wasn't going to be silenced so easily.
He followed his activity on Telegram and Facebook until his dismissal letter finally arrived.
Arctikugol has not responded to the questions asked by this newspaper.
Timofei Rogojín, on April 21 in a Longyearbyen bar. Luis Manuel Rivas
Rogojín now lives at the age of 46 in Longyearbyen, a city that, unlike Barentsburg, is experiencing a prosperous moment, with a growing population, more than 50 different nationalities and a thriving tourist industry.
“Now I spend 16 hours a day trying to tell my compatriots the truth about the war,” says Rogojín, a native of Murmansk, the largest city in the Russian Arctic, in a Longyearbyen bar.
"My country has become a fascist state," he declares.
He translates for him from Russian into English Darya Belozerova, a 25-year-old woman who left Kharkiv a few hours after the start of the invasion, bombed by Russian troops continuously since the beginning of the war.
Ella belozerova decided to return to Svalbard, this time to Longyearbyen and not to Barentsburg, where she worked for two seasons as a receptionist, in 2016 and 2019.
Rogojín contradicts the consul Guschin.
He assures that almost all the Ukrainians who remain in Barentsburg are from Donbas.
And that many families "from kyiv, from Kharkov, from Zaporizhia, from Pavlograd" did leave when the war began, especially to EU countries.
"Barentsburg has become a totalitarian city," denounces Rogojín.
“You cannot think differently.
If you are not in favor of the Russian Government, you cannot be there”, he adds.
"Or you stay, but with your mouth tightly shut," adds Belozerova outside the translation.
But not all Barentsburgs are willing to give up their right to free speech.
Natalia Maksimishina, 32, suffers from seeing images from Ukraine;
she is also affected by certain generalizations that she reads or hears in Western media about Russians.
“There were many of us who did everything possible to bring down Putin.
We demonstrated, sometimes we went back to Russia on purpose to vote against him.
It didn't help at all”, regrets this historian, who arrived in Barentsburg in January and who, due to the lack of tourists, works as a guide,
receptionist and librarian.
"And now he's gone crazy with his war," she continues.
Natalia, who came to Barentsburg to delve into the history of the Arctic expeditions of the Soviet Union, feels doubly confined.
Her Russian credit card is no longer operational in Norway.
If she wanted to, she couldn't buy some plane tickets.
And she cannot leave the few streets of Barentsburg unaccompanied;
She does not have a rifle or a weapons license, legal requirements to be able to move around the archipelago due to the risk of polar bear attacks.
She can buy the few things for sale in Barentsburg through an internal payment system managed by Arctikugol.
Aerial view of Barentsburg, at the end of April. Luis Manuel Rivas
In addition to the blocking of their credit cards, the war has had further negative consequences for the city's workers, among whom there are also a few citizens of Belarus, Moldova, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan.
Most Longyearbyen tour companies that used to organize day trips involving the 110-day round trip by boat or snowmobile have rescheduled their routes or recommend not spending any money during the hours spent in the redoubt of the Soviet Union.
Even so, relations between Longyearbyen and Barentsburg - the only two towns in the vast archipelago in which more than 50 people reside for people throughout the year - have not been completely broken: in March the traditional soccer match between once a year to both villages,
Maksimishina is grateful that in Barentsburg she can buy food of Estonian origin, something that is no longer available to those who live in Russia.
She likes to spend time in the library, which contains more than 50,000 volumes written in all the official languages of the former Soviet republics.
In general, she enjoys her time in Barentsburg.
“For me, it is being quite an anthropological experience.
It is being a pleasure, but also a challenge”, comments the young woman, who explains that human interactions in the small and harsh town have little to do with those of her native St. Petersburg.
Maksimishina, who hopes to pursue a doctorate at a Western university, appreciates the degree of solidarity she has seen among those who live in Barentsburg.
She also acknowledges that there are few who approve of the brutal attack on Ukraine.
Natalia Maksimishina, with the Russian Orthodox Church in the background. Luis Manuel Rivas
Both Maksimishina and Rogokhin completely rule out returning to Russia in the short term.
They do not know when or where they will be reunited with their relatives.
Next to the small Orthodox church -which is attended on rare holidays by an Orthodox priest who flies from Moscow-, Maksimishina admits that she is worried about her future: "I may stay here forever," she says with a bitter smile, before regretting how difficult it is for Russian citizens to obtain a residence permit in Western countries.
For now, she trusts that she will soon be in some European or American university learning even more about the Soviet explorers who risked their lives to go where no one had gone before.
A purely geostrategic interest
Moscow has always argued that it deserves a privileged position in the archipelago.
As a signatory to the Svalbard Treaty, Russia recognizes Norwegian sovereignty, but the Kremlin believes that what happens on the islands is not just Oslo's business.
Barentsburg's raison d'être is no longer coal mining.
It has an essentially geostrategic interest.
Andreas Oshtagen, a researcher at the Fridtjof Nansens Institute, explains by phone that "Svalbard is already an area of greater importance than it was 10 years ago."
The very rapid melting of the ice in the region offers economic opportunities: new maritime routes, many more fish in the fishing grounds and the possibility of carrying out more oil and gas prospecting.
The friction between the Russian and Norwegian authorities around Svalbard has been continuous.
Moscow has repeatedly complained that Norway has severely limited its possibilities by declaring more than 70% of the islands protected areas.
Arctikugol also calls on Oslo to allow it to use helicopters for tourist activities, and not just for mining.
The Government of the Scandinavian country denies this license, considering that it does not fit into what is regulated in the treaty signed more than 100 years ago.
The ban on Russian ships in Norwegian ports that came into force last Saturday does not apply in Barentsburg.
"If Russia were ever to clash militarily with NATO, the first thing it would want is to establish a kind of perimeter protection for the nuclear submarines of the Northern Fleet," says Oshtagen.
“And Svalbard could be a key piece in achieving that goal,” he adds.
Despite the fact that Russia is the only one of the 46 signatory countries of the Svalbard Treaty that extracts coal in Svalbard – along with Norway, whose only active mine is in the dismantling phase – several States do carry out scientific activities under the agreement.
Like China, which has a meteorological base in Ny-Ålesund, the northernmost permanent settlement on the planet.
Countries that have not ratified the Svalbard Treaty can still do so.
The agreement also allows citizens of the signatory countries to settle in the archipelago without having to fulfill the residency requirements that are applicable in the rest of Norway.
The last state to join was Slovakia, in 2017. The year before, North Korea did.
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