In the Russian Arctic, a Frosty Military Campaign” by Andrew E. Kramer

Read the two articles, “In the Russian Arctic, a Frosty Military Campaign” by Andrew E. Kramer and “The U.S. and Russia Need to Start Talking” by Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro. Write three paragraphs offering your views on the issue and/or comparing the articles.

 

 “In the Russian Arctic, a Frosty Military Campaign” by Andrew E. Kramer

Though the Russian military has little in common with liberal Western politicians or environmental groups like Greenpeace, it is taking ice melt in the Far North seriously.

FRANZ JOSEF LAND, Russia — Chunky green trucks carry Bastion anti-ship missiles that can be prepared for launch in just five minutes. A barracks building, sealed off from the elements like a space station, accommodates 150 or so soldiers. And a new runway can handle fighter jets, two of which recently buzzed the North Pole.

Franz Josef Land, a jumble of glacier-covered islands in the Arctic Ocean named after an Austro-Hungarian emperor, was until a few years ago mostly uninhabited, home to polar bears, walruses, sea birds and little else. But thanks to a warming climate, all that is changing, and quickly.

Nowhere on Earth has climate change been so pronounced as in the polar regions. The warming has led to drastic reductions in sea ice, opening up the Arctic to ships during the summer months and exposing Russia to new security threats.

As the sea ice melts, Russia is deploying ever more soldiers and equipment to the Far North, becoming essentially the first military to act on the strategic implications of climate change for the region in what some have called the beginnings of a Very Cold War.

At a meeting this week in Reykjavik, Iceland, Russia assumed the chair of the Arctic Council, a diplomatic club of nations, including the United States, that share interests in the region.

On the sidelines of the meeting, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in the first face-to-face meeting between a Biden administration cabinet member and a Russian counterpart. Moscow’s military buildup in the Arctic was likely to be among the many issues the two diplomats had to discuss.

For its entire history, Russia was effectively defended from the north by the frozen Arctic Ocean. But the minimum summertime ice pack on the ocean in recent years is about one-third less than the average in the 1980s, when monitoring began, researchers with the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center said last year. The ocean has lost nearly a million square miles of ice and is expected to be mostly ice-free in the summertime, including at the North Pole, by around the middle of the century.

The big melt is Russia’s strategic ”worst nightmare,” said Michael Kofman, a senior researcher at CNA, a think tank based in Arlington, Va. ”It opens an entire new theater in the event of conflict with the United States” that will prove difficult to defend, he noted. 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.

Lt. Col. Balabeg A. Eminov is the commander of the anti-ship battery and other facilities on Franz Josef Land, called the Trefoil Base. ”The main question in the Arctic is the limited accessibility for ships, because of ice,” he said. ”Now the area of open water is increasing, and with it the area for ship activity.”

Though the Russian military has little in common with liberal Western politicians or environmental groups like Greenpeace, it does share a view that the ice is indeed vanishing. That has allowed it to steal a march on the United States.

The Russian government, in contrast to the Department of Defense under the Trump administration, openly acknowledged climate change in its latest Arctic strategy, published last year. The latest U.S. military strategy for the Arctic, published in 2019, refers euphemistically to vanishing ice as the ”changing physical environment.”

The American document did, though, note that Russia now had the largest military presence above the Arctic Circle, and its avoidance of any mention of climate change is certain to change under the Biden administration.

Seemingly in anticipation of the scheduled meeting between Mr. Blinken and Mr. Lavrov, the normally opaque Russian military recently took reporters on a tour of sites that included Trefoil Base, Russia’s northernmost military installation.

With the journalists standing about shivering, Colonel Eminov presided over a demonstration of the Bastion anti-ship missiles, raising them to launch position as soldiers in white Arctic camouflage kept watch. ”We are defending the borders of our homeland,” he said. ”This is deterrence.”

In a briefing on Thursday 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.

Admiral Moiseyev spoke in the officers’ lounge, decorated with a bust of Czar Peter the Great, considered the father of the Russian Navy, and oil paintings of sailing ships in battle.

Moored at its base in Murmansk Fjord, the Peter the Great was also visited by flocks of sea gulls, which flapped around its gray-painted radar masts and over the 20 launch tubes for anti-ship missiles. Sailors with side arms stood watch by the gangplank, seemingly oblivious to the cold rain lashing their faces.

Elsewhere in Murmansk Fjord, and not shown to reporters, is another dimension of the Russian military buildup: a secretive program to train seals and beluga whales for as-yet unknown missions. Satellite images have revealed their sea pens at a special operations site. Two years ago, a trained beluga wearing a mysterious harness, possibly an escapee, turned up in Norway and was nicknamed Whaldimir.

One goal of the Russian buildup is to seize the day economically as the ocean thaws. ”Climate change enables the appearance of new economic possibilities,” Moscow asserted in its Arctic plan, envisioning a new Klondike.

The Russian government and companies have developed various moneymaking ideas to take advantage of climate change. Exploiting newly accessible reserves of oil, gas and coal — the very resources causing the problem in the first place — is high on the list. Moscow also hopes to turn an Arctic Ocean seaway between Europe and Asia, the Northern Sea Route, into essentially a toll road by requiring payments for pilots and icebreaker escorts.

That could become a flash point because Washington sees the waterway as an international trading route. The Department of Defense says it reserves the right to conduct freedom of navigation exercises in the Arctic, as it does now in the South China Sea.

For now, the military standoff has played out with ships shadowing one another’s vessels during exercises, long-range bomber overflights and jamming of navigation broadcasts, a Russian specialty.

In March, the Russian Navy surfaced three submarines simultaneously through pack ice and, lest the feat go unnoticed, filmed it with a drone and posted the footage online. The United States this month sailed the U.S.S. New Mexico, a Virginia-class submarine, into Tromso, Norway, for a rare call at a civilian port.

In the same vein, the tour for foreign journalists to some of Russia’s most remote and secretive military facilities in the Arctic Ocean seemed intended to highlight the country’s capabilities.

”Inviting journalists to come look at these modernized, reinvigorated Cold War sites is all about signaling,” said Marisol Maddox, an Arctic analyst at the Polar Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a research organization in Washington.

Russia, she said, wants to keep up its ”strongman persona” in an era of climate change.

 

“The U.S. and Russia Need to Start Talking” by Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro. 

In the five months since Russia launched its war in Ukraine, the United States has pledged about $24 billion in military aid to Ukraine. That’s more than four times Ukraine’s 2021 defense budget. America’s partners in Europe and beyond have pledged an additional $12 billion, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

And yet these tens of billions still fall short of the Ukrainian government’s wish list for weapons, which President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government announced last month. This divergence between what Ukraine wants and what its Western partners are prepared to give reflects the reality that Western leaders are pulled in two directions. They are committed to helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia’s aggression, but they are also trying to prevent the conflict from escalating into a major power war.

But escalation, though incremental and thus far contained in Ukraine, is already underway. The West is providing more and more powerful weapons, and Russia is unleashing more and more death and destruction. For as long as both Russia and the West are determined to prevail over the other in Ukraine and prepared to devote their deep reserves of weapons to achieve that goal, further escalation seems almost preordained.

The United States and its allies should certainly continue providing Ukraine with the matériel it needs, but they should also — in close consultation with Kyiv — begin opening channels of communication with Russia. An eventual cease-fire should be the goal, even as the path to it remains uncertain.

Starting talks while the fighting rages would be politically risky and would require significant diplomatic efforts, particularly with Ukraine — and success is anything but guaranteed. But talking can reveal the possible space for compromise and identify a way out of the spiral. Otherwise, this war could eventually bring Russia and NATO into direct conflict.

The current U.S. approach assumes that would happen only if the Ukrainians are given particular systems or capabilities that cross a Russian red line. So when President Biden recently announced his decision to provide Ukraine with the multiple-launch rocket system that Kyiv says it desperately needs, he deliberately withheld the longest-range munitions that could strike Russia. The premise of the decision was that Moscow will escalate — i.e., launch an attack against NATO — only if certain types of weapons are provided or if they are used to target Russian territory. The goal is to be careful to stop short of that line while giving the Ukrainians what they need to ”defend their territory from Russian advances,” as Mr. Biden said in a statement in June.

The logic is dubious. The Kremlin’s focus is precisely on making advances on Ukrainian territory. The problem is not that providing Ukraine with some specific weapon could cause escalation but rather that if the West’s support of Ukraine succeeded in stemming Russia’s advance, that would constitute an unacceptable defeat for the Kremlin. And a Russian battlefield victory is equally unacceptable to the West.

If Russia continues to push farther into Ukraine, Western partners would likely provide yet more and better weapons. If those weapons allow Ukraine to reverse Russia’s gains, Moscow may feel compelled to double down — and if it is really losing, it might well consider direct attacks against NATO. In other words, there’s no mutually acceptable outcome right now. But talks could help identify the compromises needed to find one.

The determination of both the West and Russia to do whatever it takes to prevail in Ukraine is the main driver of escalation. Western leaders should understand that the risk of escalation stems from the complete incompatibility of their goals with the Kremlin’s; carefully calibrating Western military support to Ukraine might be sensible, but it is probably beside the point. The impact of those weapons on the war, which is nearly impossible to know in advance, is what matters.

The lack of precise Russian red lines might mean that supplying the longer-range munitions Biden is withholding would not be as problematic as feared. But even if no specific weapon system will itself cause a major escalation, simply throwing more and better weapons into the mix is unlikely to solve the problem. Western weapons have clearly sustained the Ukrainian military on the battlefield, but the Russians have been willing to counter with whatever level of resources and destruction will be necessary to win or at least not to lose.

We are witnessing a classic spiral in which both sides feel compelled to do more as soon as the other side begins to make some progress. The best way to prevent that dynamic from getting out of control is to start talking before it’s too late.