Russia brings its own “police” car to Svalbard

Moscow's man in Barentsburg is again testing grey zones in Norway's Svalbard regulations. This time by unveiling a vehicle that is almost identical to police cars in Russia. "Aimed at provoking reactions," says an expert.

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The only visible difference is the name in the blue line, Politsiya (Police) is replaced with Administratsiya (Administration). Even the fonts are the same. On the roof, blue emergency lights have been replaced with what appears to be red and white lights.

Forsvarsdepartementet mener at allierte styrkers eventuelle tilstedeværelse på øya bør reguleres likt som på fastlandet.

Departementet mener derfor at dagens sikkerhetspolitiske situasjon, sett i lys av fremtidig økning i norsk og alliert tilstedeværelse i området, tilsier at det er et behov for en utvidelse av militærpolitilovens geografiske virkeområde til også å inkludere Jan Mayen.

Forskningsleder for hav og Arktis ved Fridtjof Nansens Institutt, Andreas Østhagen, mener ikke USA er noen trussel for Svalbard.
– Det vi skal frykte her er at det rammeverket vi har brukt 75 år på å bygge opp, som skal stoppe russisk aggresjon blant annet i nord og på Svalbard, ryker.
Østhagen sier at hvis det skjer, er det ingenting som stopper Russland fra å ta seg mer til rette på Svalbard, hvis de skulle ønske det.

The battle for the top of the world

By Jeffrey Gettleman

Svalbard was always a special place. But now, as the race for the Arctic heats up, it’s becoming an important one.

A set of icebound islands near the North Pole, Svalbard is technically part of Norway. But what makes it unique is that it’s governed by a century-old treaty that allows just about anyone from any country to settle there, without needing a visa.

The result is a vibrantly international community, set amid glistening ice fields and gigantic snow dunes. On a recent trip, we zoomed around on snowmobiles meeting Indian climate scientists, Russian coal miners, Norwegian tour guides and two Thai brothers who came here as boys one winter years ago and were confused about what happened to the sun — Svalbard is so far north that the sun doesn’t rise for months.

But lately, something has begun to shift. The good old days of international cooperation seem to be ending. Norway is pushing more firmly to assert its sovereignty over Svalbard and fend off foreign influence. In our reporting, we discovered that it’s cracking down on land sales to foreigners, stripping away foreigners’ voting rights, curtailing scientific research and claiming hundreds of miles of Svalbard’s seas. This has angered many countries, including some of its closest allies. All of this is changing the welcoming character of the place, many people told us.

But the Norwegian government says it needs to knuckle down. For too long Svalbard has been seen by other nations as “sort of a free-for-all, and everyone who wants to can come up and do almost whatever they want,” Eivind Vad Petersson, Norway’s state secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told us in an interview.

“That’s not the fact,” he added, sharply. “This is Norwegian sovereign territory. So we’re making that a bit clearer.”

Why is Norway, the country synonymous with international diplomacy that hands out the Nobel Peace Prize, suddenly playing tough guy? It connects to some of the same reasons Trump is fixated on seizing Greenland.

Cold, desolate, strategic

Svalbard and Greenland are rapidly becoming entangled in the race for the Arctic. As climate change melts the ice and places at the top of the world become more accessible and livable, the great powers of the world are suddenly interested.

U.S. officials have accused Chinese researchers of conducting illegal military research in Svalbard. The Russians are advancing their own claims to the islands, with language similar to their push to take Ukraine.

Like Greenland, Svalbard has enormous mineral resources. Copper, zinc, cobalt, lithium and rare-earth elements are buried in the ocean floor.

And like Greenland, Svalbard sits in a strategic location along increasingly open Arctic waterways. Their locations near the North Pole also make them an ideal place to track missiles flying across the planet and to download data from satellites.​

Something else that these Arctic regions have in common is their unusual territorial status: Greenland was a Danish colony, and now is a Danish overseas territory, still partly controlled by Copenhagen, but geographically distant. (Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, is closer to Washington than it is to Copenhagen.) Svalbard, for its part, is governed by a unique treaty that allows other countries to have the same access there as Norwegians.

Maybe this has something to do with the fact that until recent decades, it was difficult to reach the Arctic and so territorial claims there weren’t firmly established. But in our new era of elbows-out geopolitics, these unusual statuses have become liabilities.

Where great powers meet

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to meet today with officials from Denmark and Greenland in a conversation that will be closely watched around the world. The U.S. quest to annex Greenland — either via force, or by purchasing the island — will have repercussions that go far beyond what’s happening in Svalbard. The Greenland issue is becoming a test of how far the United States will go to upend the world order and do whatever it wants, even to its allies.

In Svalbard, the competition for resources and access might not be as intense, but it’s growing.

The Arctic is where several great powers meet — just look at how close Russia, Canada, the United States and Greenland are to one another at the top of the world. The contest is being driven by three factors: a hunger for resources, a rawer moment in geopolitics and climate change. The warmer days are thinning the Arctic ice, and it’s almost as if a whole new region of the world is suddenly emerging. The scramble is on to control it.​