On Alexandra Land, part of Franz Josef Land about 350 km east of Svalbard, a Russian air base now stands where gravel and ice once served as an airstrip. The runway has been replaced with concrete and lengthened for modern fighter jets, bombers and long-range patrol aircraft. Nagurskoye is the most striking symbol of a decade in which Moscow rebuilt its northern frontier.
What was reopened and what was built
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, counted 50 previously closed Soviet-era military posts reopened in the Russian Arctic by 2020. They included 13 air bases, 10 radar stations, 20 border outposts and 10 integrated emergency rescue stations. Russia also built from scratch. High North News, a Norwegian outlet, found at least three new bases, all in the same “Arctic Trefoil” design, with a triangular central building for living and administration. They opened between 2015 and 2017 in the western, central and eastern Arctic: Nagurskoye, Temp Air Base on Kotelny Island in the New Siberian Islands, and Ushakovskoye on Wrangel Island. A dozen older bases and airfields were modernised as well.
Air defence came with them. High North News reported S-300 and S-400 surface-to-air missiles at a number of bases, and CSIS put Bastion-P and Pantsir-S1 systems on Kotelny Island and Novaya Zemlya, a layered coastal shield that reaches deeper into the central Arctic. Squadrons of MiG-31 interceptors sit at Rogachevo on Novaya Zemlya. CNN, citing satellite imagery from March 16, 2021, saw what appeared to be MiG-31BMs at Nagurskoye for the first time.
The fleet at the centre
At the heart of all this is the Northern Fleet, based at Severomorsk on the Kola Peninsula. CSIS dates its role as an Arctic Strategic Command to 2014. In 2021 it was reorganised into Russia’s fifth military district, as High North News recorded. Rebecca Pincus of the Wilson Center told the outlet that “much of Russia’s strategic nuclear assets are concentrated in the Kola Peninsula.”
The aims, CSIS argued, were three: a forward line of defence, a secure economic future and a platform for projecting power into the North Atlantic. Moscow itself has long said its goals are economic and peaceful, and CNN reported that a March 2020 Kremlin strategy document described an area behind 20% of Russia’s exports and 10% of its GDP. A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Thomas Campbell, saw it differently. Russia, he said, was strengthening its “anti-access and area-denial capabilities” over key parts of the Arctic and had set up a Quick Reaction Alert force at two airfields, Rogachevo and Anadyr.
After Ukraine
Would the war in Ukraine hollow out all this? Experts quoted by High North News in September 2022 doubted a direct line between failures on the Ukrainian front and Arctic strength. Troy Bouffard of the University of Alaska Fairbanks said the Arctic forces were “somewhat filtered from the systemic failures in Ukraine as a result of relatively new hardware and personnel advancements.” He did expect the pace of expansion to slow, warning that Russia could keep a strong bastion defence in the north, “though probably at a reduced or stagnate pace.”
Sources
- THE ICE CURTAIN: RUSSIA'S ARCTIC MILITARY PRESENCE (CSIS, Heather A. Conley and Matthew Melino)
- From Ukraine to the Arctic: Russia's Capabilities in the Region and the War's Impact on the North (High North News, Malte Humpert)
- Russia is amassing unprecedented military might in the Arctic (CNN, Nick Paton Walsh)
