‘Nature is being destroyed’: Russia’s arms buildup in Barents Sea creating toxic legacy
The Barents Sea port of Severomorsk is the base of the Russian navy’s Northern Fleet and, since 2014 – when Russia first invaded eastern Ukraine – it has become the main administrative hub for all of Russia’s Arctic military activities.
As the war in Ukraine grinds on, Russia is not so quietly expanding its military activities in this region, too. In the past six years, Russia has built 475 military sites along its northern border. The Kola peninsula and the archipelagos of the Barents Sea have seen dozens of new airstrips, bunkers and bases.
But while the region has long been one of Russia’s most important commercial and military hubs, the deep waters of the Barents Sea are among the most biodiverse of any in the Arctic region, home to puffins, dolphins, seals, and rare bowhead whales, as well as being home to some of the world’s biggest fish populations. To its southern side, on the Kola peninsula, herds of wild reindeer can still be found and its eastern rivers, free from hydroelectric dams, are among the few remaining spawning grounds for Atlantic salmon.
The Barents Sea is one of the most biodiverse in the Arctic, with beluga whales among the species found there. Photograph: Andrey Nekrasov/Alamy
“There are still villages without road systems, where they are maintaining a unique and traditional lifestyle,” says Tero Mustonen, a conservationist with Snowchange Cooperative, who has worked in the Kola region for 25 years.
The unprecedented new military buildup has experts concerned about devastating results for these delicate Arctic ecosystems. It is already among the most polluted places on Earth. Currents that carry warm water from the Atlantic Ocean into the Barents Sea make it one of the world’s great marine garbage patches, while decades of Soviet nuclear tests, the dumping of radioactive waste, and industrial pollution have left many waterways highly toxic, contributing to elevated rates of disease among local people.
The great concern is that oil pollution from ships that are not equipped for the Arctic will greatly increase
Tero Mustonen, conservationist
The latest military buildup has already resulted in an increase in weapons testing and marine traffic, including from new and refurbished nuclear-powered icebreakers and submarines – with the attendant risk of nuclear accidents.
But that is not the only threat to the Barents Sea ecosystem spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As it finds itself increasingly alienated from the western economy, Russia has accelerated its efforts to open the region to commercial activity.
In April, after western nations suspended their participation in the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, which Russia chaired, it signed a cooperation agreement with the Chinese coast guard to conduct combined exercises to police its northern coastline. The move was widely viewed as an attempt to fulfil longstanding Chinese ambitions to assert itself as a “near-Arctic state”, gaining greater access to commercial activity and mineral resources in the region.
The Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker 50 Years of Victory in the Barents Sea. New and refurbished nuclear-powered icebreakers are part of the latest military buildup. Photograph: John Borthwick/Getty Images/Lonely Planet Image
But Russia’s northern sea route, which halves the time it takes to ship goods between Europe and Asia, is still unreliable. Dozens of ships were stranded in early sea ice in 2021, while the longer route east to Asia is often far more ice-clogged and perilous than the alternative route westward.
Nonetheless, experts say, Russia’s increasing dependence on China is likely to increase traffic on the route. “More oil, more shipping, more resources will be transferred between those countries that are still trading … [including] more shipping with vessels that are not equipped for the Arctic Ocean,” says Mustonen. “The great concern there … is that the oil pollution from ships and tankers that are not equipped for the environment will greatly increase.”
More shipping also means increased concentrations of ozone and nitrate aerosol that are dangerous to human health, and nitrogen and sulphur deposits that could devastate marine ecosystems. In the Barents Sea that concern is particularly acute, as the region is already quite possibly the fastest-warming location on Earth.
It is not only the scale of shipping that is changing, but also the cargo being carried. Without access to Norwegian offshore technologies and investment, Russia has cooled on oil and gas projects in the Barents Sea – and turned instead to new open-pit mines in the Murmansk regionof the Kola peninsula to secure domestic supplies of minerals such as lithium that are crucial to electric-vehicle battery production.
Sign up to Global Dispatch
Free newsletter
Get a different world view with a roundup of the best news, features and pictures, curated by our global development team
Enter your email address
Sign up
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Vulnerable northern nature is being destroyed – and it cannot be restored
Andrei Danilov, Sami activist
Many of those mines will be on the lands of the Indigenous Sami people, which have come under unprecedented pressure since the invasion of Ukraine. Aleksandr Slupachik, a Sami activist from Kola forced to flee to Norway from Russia, says two mines have already been developed on traditional reindeer herding pastures. “I think it will cause big ecological problems in the future,” he says.
Areas once set aside as nature reserves – such as the Lake Seidozero region, a sacred Sami site – are also being opened to industry, according to Andrei Danilov, another Russian Sami activist in exile. “There is no question of any observance of international law and coordination with Indigenous peoples,” he says. “Vulnerable northern nature is being destroyed – and it cannot be restored.”
The conning tower of the Russian Kursk nuclear submarine. A number of explosions sank the vessel with 118 men on board in August 2000. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Relations with the west, experts say, have been key to preventing these kinds of ecological abuses in the Russian Arctic, and not only in the mining sector. Russia had recently started to invest heavily in Atlantic salmon farming, near important spawning sites across the border in Norway. “The fear is that [with] Russia removing themselves from the international regulation on salmon farming … diseases and sea lice and salmon parasites will proliferate from the big bins of Atlantic salmon,” says Mustonen. Likewise, Norway was one of the only countries investing in cleaning up the sea’s nuclear waste, toxic remnants of the cold war.
Arctic Ocean acidifying up to four times as fast as other oceans, study finds
Read more
Yet if there is environmental destruction, it will be harder than ever for the rest of the world to know about it. Environmental organisations, including Greenpeace and WWF, have been outlawed in Russia, and collaborations on Arctic climate monitoring have almost entirely stopped. “It’s a pity that the network we managed to establish has broken down,” says Lars-Otto Reiersen, who for decades led climate-monitoring projects for the Arctic Council. “I don’t think the Russians are spending money on this.”
“Western concern about the environment was critical,” says Florian Vidal, an expert in political ecology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. “The Russians used to show at least some goodwill.” But with investment now coming primarily from China, India and the Gulf states, “environmental protection … is not a priority”.
This article was amended on 24 July 2023 to remove an image of the Akademik Tryoshnikov polar ship, which is a research vessel, not a military vessel.