Free Republic

Russia said on Wednesday that restrictions imposed by Norway were blocking the transport of goods to Russian-populated settlements on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and called on Oslo to resolve the issue as soon as possible or face consequences. The ministry said that it summoned Norway's Chargé d'Affaires to protest the restrictions, which it said were blocking the transport of food and medical equipment. Svalbard is part of Norway, although Russia has the right to exploit the archipelago's natural resources under a treaty signed in 1920 and maintains a diplomatic presence in the largely Russian- and Ukrainian-populated settlement of Barentsburg.

The stretch between Svalbard and the North Cape of mainland Norway constitutes the Bear Gap, which is the Arctic Circle analogue to the better-known Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap.4 Svalbard’s proximity to the Kola Peninsula and Novaya Zemlya—home to Russia’s Northern Fleet and its nuclear weapons test site, respectively—further helps explain Moscow’s enduring interest in Svalbard. The archipelago’s importance is likely to grow as maritime trade increases in the Arctic. The Pentagon’s 2024 Arctic Strategy notes, “Reduction in sea ice due to climate change means chokepoints such as the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia and the Barents Sea north of Norway are...

Operator of what is the world’s northernmost fiber optic subsea cable, Space Norway, has located the disruption to somewhere between 130 to 230 kilometers from Longyearbyen in the area where the seabed goes from 300 meters down to 2700 meters in the Greenland Sea. The error happened on Friday morning, January 7. Svalbard Undersea Cable System is a twin submarine fiber optic communication cable connecting Longyearbyen with Andøya north of Harstad in northern Norway. The two cables are 1,375 and 1,339 km respectively, and Space Norway informs in a press release that there is good connection in the cable still...