Last week, the Russians made their Nagurskoye air base on the Franz Joseph Land, an archipelago of 192 islands in the Arctic Ocean north of the Barents Sea, available to Western news media for a tour. CNN reported on May 21 on the upgrading of the base including the lengthening of the runway to 3,500 meters, long enough to handle the largest aircraft. Asked whether this also meant Russia’s heavy strategic bombers, like the TU-95 “Bear,” were able to operate from here, Maj. Gen. Igor Churkin proudly confirmed they could. “Of course they can,” he boasted, pointing to a briefing chart of the base. “Have a look. We can land all types of aircraft on this base.”
The base, CNN says, makes it clear that the great power competition is heating up in the Arctic, and Russia views the base as a key asset in that struggle, adding that the White House has been watching Russia’s military buildup with increasing concern — seemingly ignoring the fact that this “militarization of the Arctic” is taking place within Russia’s sovereign territory.
The New York Times, in its coverage of the same press tour, at least reports that the melting of the Arctic Sea ice has presented Russia with new problems as well as opportunities that it intends to take advantage of. The big melt is Russia’s strategic “worst nightmare,” said Michael Kofman, a senior researcher at CNA, a think tank based in Arlington, Virginia. “It opens an entire new theater in the event of conflict with the United States” that will prove difficult to defend, he wrote. Of the five nations with significant Arctic coastline — Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States — Russia has by far the longest.
“In a sense, Russia is acquiring new external borders that need to be protected from potential aggressors,” the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a Berlin-based think tank, wrote of Russia’s problem of disappearing ice.
In a briefing on May 20 aboard the battlecruiser Peter the Great, Adm. Aleksandr A. Moiseyev, commander of the Northern Fleet, painted the Russian buildup as a response to increased Western military activity in the Arctic Ocean. “The navies of NATO have taken to regularly sailing single surface warships or even convoys” into the ocean and lingering longer than they had before, Admiral Moiseyev said. He called it the most significant military activity in the region since World War II. On the Russian side, the Northern Fleet will run sea trials on 13 new ships this year, he said, adding to the more than four dozen already in service.
