Putin Stirs the Waters
Looking North . . .
Earlier this week, under the guise of “Arctic 2007″ expedition, two Russian mini-subs ventured to the depths of North Pole’s seabed, where divers planted the Russian flag.
The 4 million USD trip was an attempt to establish Russia’s northern boundaries, allegedly now stretching to the North Pole. During this expedition, Russia was keen to prove the Lomonosov Ridge running under the Arctic is an extension of the existing continental shelf of Siberia. The thought is, based on a UN Convention, if Russia can make this connection, it can lay legitimate sovereign claim to the North Pole.
Such a legitimate claim would be a boost to Russia’s already existing wide expanse of mineral and oil deposits and control a vitally strategic northern access point.
A robot arm planted a rust proof Russian flag. Perhaps the larger significance of this move is the way in which it was done – very publicly in full view of Russian state-run media. The nationalist undertones seem more disturbing, than the paranoia that Russia will be expanding its natural resources empire to the North Pole.
The Foreign Ministry – driving Russia’s expanding foreign policy goals – firms up its support and aims of the expedition. The Guardian quotes Russian FM Sergei Lavrov . . .
“I think this expedition will supply additional scientific evidence for our aspirations,” Lavrov said in televised remarks. He added though, the issue of which nation what portion of the polar region “will be resolved in strict compliance with international law.”
Western Reaction: No so fast Mr. Putin . . .
Both the United States and Canada have bluntly warned Russia that any claim of the North Pole would not be tolerated.
Bloomberg covers the reaction . . .
The U.S. said Russia planting its tri-color flag on the seabed under the North Pole doesn’t validate the former communist country’s claim to the mineral- rich Arctic territory.
“I’m not sure of whether they’ve put a metal flag, a rubber flag or a bed sheet on the ocean floor,” State Department spokesman Tom Casey said in Washington yesterday. “Either way, it doesn’t have any legal standing or effect on this claim.”
. . . Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay said yesterday after the dive that the Russians are “fooling” themselves if they believe they can simply lay claim to the Arctic.
“You can’t go around the world these days, dropping a flag somewhere. This isn’t the 14th or 15th century,” MacKay told reporters in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
. . . Any new evidence Russia produces from this expedition will be evaluated by the UN, Casey said. If the explorers “went and spray-painted a flag of Russia on those particular ridges” it wouldn’t make “one iota of difference” to Russian claims to the territory, he added.
Arctic Circle has many territorial claims
Many countries have terrorial claims within the Arctic Circle. Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States all have stakes in the northern corridor. As global warming continues to soften parts of the Arctic, countries like Russia consider the extraction of energy and mineral resources more feasible.
Gauging the Impact of a Russian-controlled North Pole
Rod Liddle in today’s Sunday Times opines on the potential environmental impact . . .
Now the Russians have planted a flag 13,980ft beneath the North Pole, claiming some half a million square miles of Arctic seabed for themselves (despite being signatories to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). There are rich oil and mineral deposits down there.
It is assumed by the Russian newspapers that this is the first blow in the battle for control of this bounty and that some day soon there will be a brave new closed city like Chelyabinsk or Krasnoyarsk rising from the snow up there – perhaps the usual tower blocks of grim concrete apartments surrounded by belching refineries, decomposing seal carcasses and woebegone polar bears.
It’s a pleasing, if naive, thought that the Arctic should belong to all of us and, by extension, none of us. But if it is to be divided up I think I would rather it fell into the hands of Chad than Russia. Maybe Moscow should be told that it can have the North Pole when the Aral Sea has been restored to its previous size and Siberia no longer has a half-life.
Just High Drama?
Florida’s St. Petersburg Times editorial board made this observation . . .
Russia certainly succeeded in dramatizing its claim to potential oil and other resources on the ocean floor. But the stunt was meaningless theater and comical for a nation with such a brutal history of flouting territorial law.
. . . Russia’s dive, in two minisubmarines, was designed to put pressure on an international commission to recognize Russia’s territorial claim. Moscow contends that an underwater ridge extending from Russia comprises nearly half the seabed, making the territory Russian property. Planting a flag there does not make it so. The United States and Canada were right to dismiss the event as self-serving and provocative.
The mission itself was risky, especially the ascension of the small submarines. They had to find their way back to a hole on the ice surface. Let Vladimir Putin make what he will of it, but at least Russian scientists celebrated the mission for what it was – a noteworthy technical and technological achievement that settles nothing.
Polar Posturing in a Global Ice Race: Another Front in the Neo-Cold War?
The Sunday Times continues its coverage of this issue with this . . .
The next cold war has already started and this one will be frozen. The battle for the mineral treasures of the Arctic will not only last for decades, it will be fought in temperatures below -40C, amid bone-chilling blizzards and unrelieved winter darkness.
The submarine stunt by Russian explorers intent on staking Moscow’s Arctic claim has provided a jolt of urgency to international efforts to protect and administer what one American admiral described as “the last great unexplored bastion on earth”.
The political powers of the northern hemisphere are suddenly facing tense negotiations over who gets what in an oil and gas-rich polar territory twice the size of France.
. . . At stake in this outbreak of polar posturing is not just patriotic pride, but access to what geologists believe are a quarter of the globe’s oil and gas reserves – in short, the solution to the crippling energy shortages that will begin throttling western economies within the next two decades.
A potent combination of global warming – causing the Arctic ice-cap to melt – and developing extraction technologies is unlocking the door to hydrocarbon deposits that had long seemed inaccessible. Scientists believe climate change may open up a key Arctic shipping route – the fabled Northwest passage linking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – to routine maritime traffic by 2050.
“Experts say after 2016, oil production will drop tremendously,” said Anatoly Opekunov, deputy director of Russia’s Research Institute for Ocean Geology and Mineral Resources. “Every country, including Russia and the US, is thinking about this.”
Russia Also Moving South . . .
After a week of diving beneath the waters of the North Pole, for the first time since the Cold War, the Kremlin announced this week its intention to revive the presence of the Russian navy in the Mediterranean corridor with a permanent base.
More on this from the Daily Mail . . .
“The Mediterranean Sea is very important strategically for the Black Sea fleet,” head of the navy Admiral Vladimir Masorin said yesterday.
“I propose that, with the involvement of the Northern and Baltic fleets, the Russian Navy should restore its permanent presence there.”
. . . it would mean sharing Mediterranean waters with the US Sixth Fleet – whose home base is in Italy – and this could further exacerbate recent tensions between the two.
Russia’s new forcefulness has created friction and prompted some Western policymakers to make comparisons with the Cold War.
Mr Putin has said Russia would target its missiles at sites in Europe if Washington went ahead with a plan to build elements of a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe.
He has also suspended Russia’s compliance with an arms control treaty.
During the Cold War, the Soviet navy had a permanent presence on the Mediterranean, using the Syrian port of Tartus as a supply point.
“It has been the dream of our admirals for a long time to restore our naval greatness and keep the task force we had under the Soviet Union,” said military expert Pavel Felgenhauer.
Analysts say the Russbeenian navy is only just recovering from the under-funding of the 1990s when many sailors left the accident-prone fleet.
It has not been revealed where the fleet would be based, but the most likely option would be reviving the Tartus base.
“We still maintain a naval station in Syria but that has been mostly standing empty because, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the naval task force was withdrawn,” said Mr Felgenhauer.
He believes Russia has so few ships it would be unlikely to tip the strategic balance in the Mediterranean.
“The surface fleet right now is very small. There have excursions (into the Mediterranean) several times in the 1990s, but I do not think right now we have the naval capability to keep a sizeable force there all the time.”
Mr Putin’s increased defence spending could see an expansion of the fleet, however.
If Russia does build up a base in Syria, it could anger Israel, which has criticised Moscow for supplying weapons to Damascus.
A potential substitute location for the Black Sea Fleet?
The Kyiv Post had this . . .
Commentators have suggested in the past that Russia might seek to relocate part of its Black Sea Fleet to the Mediterranean if it fails to get an extension of its agreement with Western-leaning Ukraine on leasing the Sevastopol port when it expires in 2017.
Putting Syria back on the map in the Neo-Cold War chess game
Speculation is that Russia’s purported Mediterranean expansion will be in its old digs in the Syrian port, Tartus or in Latakia.
This would certainly raise Syria’s stock in the region, and complicate matters for the United States and other Western powers intent on hedging Damascus’s influence in Lebanon, Iraq and the wider Middle East.
The Telegraph has a bit on this rising speculation . . .
According to Ivan Safronov, the journalist who died after mysteriously falling from a building in Moscow this year, Russia had also begun to expand the port at Latakia, also in Syria. President Vladimir Putin has been anxious to restore Moscow’s influence in the Middle East, signing controversial arms deals with both Syria and Iran that have upset the United States and Israel.
If the port plan were to go ahead, Russian vessels and warships from the US Sixth Fleet, based in Italy, would face one another in the Mediterranean for the first time since the Cold War when the Soviet navy was based in Tartus. Russia maintains a symbolic and largely empty logistical facility at Tartus – its only military base outside the former Soviet Union.
Washington will be watching both developments with concern.
8 August, 2007 at 8:02 pm
[...] Over North Pole A week after Russia made much ado about their North Pole flag planting [see Putin Stirs the Waters], its strategic aviation conducted tactical air exercises over the North Pole including the test [...]