Russia and China are opening a new anti-western front in the Arctic

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The writer is professor of international history at LSE and author of ‘Post Wall, Post Square’

On October 21 — exactly two weeks after what appeared to be deliberate EU-pipe and cable breakages in the Baltic Sea — Nato Admiral Rob Bauer made a major statement. “We must prepare for the fact that conflict can present itself at any moment and in any domain, including the Arctic.” 

With war continuing to rage in Ukraine, Bauer believed that the “Russian threat” could also “come from the High North”. He looked towards China, too, which has significantly intensified its activity in the region.

After Finland’s accession to Nato earlier this year, Russia finds itself flanked in the west, north and east by the alliance. Yet it asserts geostrategic pre-eminence in the Arctic, its immense military strength combining with its control of growing commercial activity on the Northern Sea Route (NSR) — Arctic waters to which Moscow lays extensive legal claims.

China’s entry on to this scene, meanwhile, has been remarkable. Over the past decade, it has pumped some $90bn into Russian Arctic fossil-fuel and mineral projects. Gradually, it has also began to co-operate with Moscow over the creation of its “Polar Silk Road” — the newest strand of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Beijing’s Arctic ambitions, rooted in overwhelming economic leverage, were thrown into relief this year when western sanctions began to bite in Moscow. In March, Russia and China agreed to establish a joint umbrella organisation for traffic along the NSR. In April, a bilateral Arctic maritime agreement was signed by the FSB Border Guard Service and the Chinese Coast Guard. This formally pulled China, a self-declared “near-Arctic state,” into the region’s security arrangements.

By July, a regular Chinese NSR container-line service between St Petersburg and Shanghai had started and Russia made its first crude oil shipments to Asia. Using non-ice class oil tankers, Russia has discarded good practice on ice-protection, putting profit over environmental security.

Geographically, Russia holds the reins, although China controls the purse strings. Russia operates its Arctic ports; its state atomic corporation, Rosatom, grants foreign ships NSR traffic permits plus atomic icebreaker assistance. Torgmoll, a Chinese transport and logistics group and its newest subsidiary, NewNew Shipping Line, serve Sino-Russian Arctic cabotage and commerce.

How this Arctic Sino-Russian rapprochement is to be understood, how far the Chinese state is directly involved in this bilateral web of trade and military ties and what Xi’s Arctic intentions really are, remain unclear. 

The issue of potentially hostile joint Sino-Russian activities, however, suddenly surfaced over the infrastructure incidents in the Gulf of Finland on October 7-8 affecting the Finno-Estonian Balticconnector pipeline and two fibre-optic undersea cables linking Estonia with Finland and Sweden.

Automatic identification system data revealed that NNSL’s NewNew Polar Bear, seemingly in tandem with Rosatomflot’s Sevmorput, had steamed over all three sites at the times of the ruptures. The Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, surmised that these acts of possibly intentional damage were “related”. The Finns agreed, pointing to deep drag marks around the pipe and a broken anchor lifted from the seabed, even before photos of the Polar Bear in Arkhangelsk on October 22 showed the ship without its anchor.

Other details to have emerged have merely fanned speculation. These include a crew substitution on the Polar Bear in Kaliningrad just prior to the ruptures and the ship’s reluctance to engage with Finland’s coast guard as it began its journey back to the Pacific.

Although the focus was on the Polar Bear, Russian complicity cannot be ruled out. While China has so far shown restraint in Europe’s North, Russia has both a motive and a history of intimidating neighbours. 

Yet China doubtless fears that a weak Russia could “lose” to the west in Ukraine. Seeing much to gain from a common pursuit of a “post-western”, polycentric” world, China probably calculates the costs of limited acts of provocation against Nato to be low.

Whatever the truth, the dual Sino-Russian presence around the Baltic Sea incidents has certainly unsettled Nato allies. Northern waters appear to be contested maritime environments — commercially, politically and increasingly militarily.

Nato wants to prevent conflict. But it must also deter enemies and ensure that its infrastructure is secure, Bauer said. The Arctic waterways should stay “free and navigable” for everyone’s benefit.