SVALBARD, NORWAY—Even in summer, the air is clear and cold in Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost inhabited town, which is located above the Arctic Circle in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. The message from officials we recently spoke with there was clear, too, but also chilling: In the High North, the geopolitical dynamics are shifting, and the tensions are getting worse.
The “High North” is a somewhat fluid concept, but it generally encompasses the space between Norway’s Arctic, west to Greenland, and east to one of the most nuclearized places in the world, Russia’s Kola Peninsula. It also usually includes northerly regions of NATO allies Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland, as well as surrounding waterways.
Although the High North was not a focus of the recent NATO Summit in The Hague, the situation in Svalbard should be squarely in NATO’s focus going forward. Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to view the High North as increasingly important to Russia’s military security and as an evocative element of Russia’s national identity. It is the home to the core of Russia’s nuclear second-strike capability: Russia’s submarine-launch ballistic missile-capable fleet. This fleet is based in Severomorsk, Murmansk, tucked behind the Kola Peninsula, about 990 miles from Svalbard. Russian submarines must cross the shallow waters of the Barents Sea through the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap to gain access to the depths of the broader Atlantic Ocean, where detection is far more difficult.
Voice of Ukraine 