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Arctic Yearbook 2015
60 kilometres from the Finnish border. By 2016 another brigade will be established
on the Yamal peninsula (Klimenko 2015).
While Russia reiterated that it considers a strong Russian military presence and the protection of its
interests in the Arctic by military means as an integral part of its national security (Pettersen 2015a)
and also named the Arctic as key area in its new maritime doctrine (Pettersen 2015e), the Nordic
ministers of defense and Iceland’s minister of foreign affairs reacted to the changed security
environment in a joint declaration:
The Russian aggression against Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Crimea are
violations of international law and other international agreements. Russia’s
conduct represents the gravest challenge to European security. As a consequence,
the security situation in the Nordic countries’ adjacent areas has become
significantly worsened during the past year…. we must be prepared to face possible
crises or incidents (Bentzrød 2015).
This statement highlights the possibility that the Arctic states – if they ever did – seem to have lost a
large degree of their unconditional belief in a common set of norms for peaceful dispute settlement
in the Arctic region.
Norms for collective action
Within the framework of the Arctic Council, the Arctic states adopted two agreements which
established legally binding mechanisms for acting cooperatively in the fields of Search and Rescue
(SAR) (Arctic SAR Agreement 2011) and for reacting collectively to marine oil pollution in the Arctic
(Agreement on Oil Pollution Preparedness and Response in the Arctic 2013). They furthermore
provided joint declarations for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) (Arctic Council 2015).
Similar cooperation on issues of traditional military security are, if at all, expressed in a number of
joint military exercises in the region with their main tasks of practicing SAR, Anti-Terrorism and AntiPiracy (Regehr & Buelles 2015: 70 ff.). Other Arctic-specific forms of military cooperation do not
exist, since the countries rather focus on other multilateral defense co-operations, most notably
NATO, the ‘Nordic Defence Cooperation (NORDEFCO)’, or bilateral co-operation, such as between
the US and Canada or between Norway and Russia.
In course of the Ukrainian crisis, the picture of military cooperation and collective defense in the
Arctic became even more fragmented. While all direct military cooperation with Russia – thus also all
joint military exercises – was suspended, military exercises on both sides seem now to follow a
perfidious geopolitical logic of escalation in which every ‘show of force’ from one side sees a direct
response from the other side. After Norway’s largest military exercise in proximity to the NorwegianRussian border since 1967, Russia carried out an even larger military exercise of its Arctic Northern
fleet. The disproportionate nature of Russia’s exercise becomes particularly evident considering that
the Norwegian exercise was announced far ahead in time and involved around 5,000 Norwegian
soldiers, while Russia’s involved a total of 38,000 soldiers and was carried out without prior
notification (Mjaaland 2015). This increasing military tit-for-tat repeated itself when Russia in May
The Arctic Security Community