As of: March 15, 2024, 2:48 p.m
By: Steffen Maas
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Press
Split
Russia is testing its limits in the Arctic.
There, Norway administers the demilitarized Svalbard archipelago.
Moscow wants to fight for sovereignty - if necessary, as in the Ukraine war.
Svalbard/Norway – Norway is sounding the alarm in the Arctic: Oslo and the Norwegian secret services have been warning about the provocations of their Russian neighbors for a long time.
Now Russia is becoming clear in a demilitarized zone of all places: Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Trutnev is intensifying his aggressive rhetoric around the shared archipelago of Spitsbergen and is now openly threatening - with concrete comparisons to the war in Ukraine.
In an emergency like in the Ukraine war: Russia wants to fight for rights in Norway
“None of the rights and privileges acquired by Russia can be restricted or violated,” Trutnev said in an official government meeting on the Svalbard issue in February,
The Barents Observer
reported.
The Norwegian government will be concerned about the ease with which Trutnev is bridging the issue into the Ukraine war.
There, Russian warriors are shedding blood for their country's sovereignty, said the deputy prime minister.
He suggested that the tensions in Svalbard should be addressed in the same way: This too is “a fight for sovereignty, a fight for the rights of Russia and Russians.”
Not a politics-free zone: A statue of a coal miner in the center of Longyearbyen has had a Ukrainian flag draped around its shoulders on the first anniversary of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.
© Steffen Trumpf/dpa
Trutnev's aggressive rhetoric comes just days after he welcomed battle-hardened veterans of the Ukrainian war to his office as head of Russia's Arctic ministry.
Ministry colleague Sergei Chukunkov emphasized on Telegram, among other things, that the soldiers' real combat experience would be used - "for the development of the Far East and the Arctic".
Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean: Needlesticks from Moscow have a long history
However, the Russian pinpricks on the archipelago, which is of immense importance for Arctic and climate research, are not a new development.
The islands are open to all Svalbard Treaty states for economic and scientific purposes.
However, Russia in particular, which has been mining there for over a century, often flouted this arrangement.
Since the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the constant border violations and incidents have primarily concerned the express ban on using Svalbard for military purposes.
2014: Putin confidant Dmitri Rogozin, then Russian deputy prime minister, stops off in Svalbard.
However, since the attack on Crimea, he has been on the EU sanctions list and is not allowed to enter Norwegian territory due to an entry ban.
According to the NZZ at the time, Moscow considers the subsequent irritation from Oslo to be a “Norwegian overreaction”.
2016: A special operations force under the command of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov uses the Longyearbyen airport in Svalbard's administrative center for military purposes.
There they are preparing a North Pole exercise for their paratroopers by transporting military equipment and personnel.
2022: Over the course of a few days, Norwegian police arrest a total of seven Russian citizens who were using drones to take illegal aerial photographs of Norwegian airports.
The highlight of the events, which the then and current Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre called “unacceptable” according to the Tagesspiegel, was the arrest of the son of Putin confidant Vladimir Jakunin.
While in custody, Andrei Yakunin admitted to having piloted several unauthorized drone flights over Svalbard.
2022: The world's northernmost fiber optic cable, connecting mainland Norway to Svalbard, is severed.
It not only supplies the settlements of Svalbard with internet, but also serves to connect to over 100 satellite antennas that are used to control unique polar orbiting satellites.
As early as 2022, investigators will rule out a natural cause of the disorder.
In the 2024 annual report, Norway's intelligence services highlight Russia's ability and willingness to sabotage communications cables and underwater infrastructure.
The recent, initially verbal escalation of the situation has now finally mutated from the category of “political games” to “threatening” in the context of the Ukraine war.
It is not without reason that people in Norway are now arming themselves against their Russian neighbors.
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For Russia, it is also about strategic military positioning in the Arctic Sea and on NATO's northern flank: Russia stores some of its nuclear weapons on the coast of the adjacent Barents Sea, in the port of Murmansk and surrounded by a fleet of nuclear submarines.
Brigadier General Eystein Kvarving, head of communications for the Norwegian armed forces, recently revealed to
IPPEN.MEDIA
that they are also trying to maintain constant contact: every week they contact Russia's nuclear fleet - in case of an emergency.
Secret services warn of Russia's military presence - could trigger an energy crisis through sabotage?
In addition to Russia's constant threat to enforce supposed territorial claims with force if necessary, something else is also at stake in the Arctic: resources.
The Norwegian secret services now reported, shortly after Trutnew's comparisons to the Ukraine war, that Russia was using civilian ships to spy on the Scandinavians' coastal and deep-sea infrastructure.
The intelligence report suspects that Russia could carry out sabotage actions “with the aim of triggering or worsening a European energy crisis.”
After the sanctions against Russia, Norway is Europe's largest gas supplier.
According to NZZ, the Norwegian broadcaster NRK expressed the suspicion that Moscow could be trying to show that Oslo cannot really enforce the sovereignty over the Arctic territory that it always insists on.
Putin's confidant Dmitri Rogozin made it clear years ago that Russia generally has ambitions in the Arctic.
Rogozin, who was wounded by shrapnel in Donetsk in 2022, pushed forward the militarization of the area and spoke of a “positive and civilized way” to “colonize” it.
Words that have sounded dangerous, at least since the war of aggression in Ukraine.