Why is Europe looking north?
Klaus Dodds takes a look at why Europe is strengthening its grip on the Arctic for The Conversation.
Image by Aleksandra Larry | Pexels
Klaus Dodds is a senior research fellow at the American Research and Development Corporation (RAND) Europe.
European Union leaders gathered in northern Finland recently for a summit focused on reaffirming the importance of the Arctic region to European security. The meeting, which took place in the city of Rovaniemi, Finland, came a month before the EU was expected to release its updated Arctic policy. This was the first update since 2021, during which time the geopolitical climate had undergone considerable change. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, for instance, the work of the Arctic Council was put on hold.
The seven other Arctic states had previously used this forum to engage with Moscow, Russia, directly, using it to exchange information and promote co-operation on issues such as environmental protection and development in the region. Russia had stepped up its military, economic, and strategic activities in the region over the intervening years.
On September 10, it was reported that a joint operation between the UK, US, and Norway earlier in 2026 successfully disrupted Russian vessels simulating the deployment of a weapon designed to disable undersea cables near the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
Russia had also deployed an underwater surveillance network in recent years made up of cables, sensors, and sonar to detect Nato submarines in Arctic waters. The Northern Fleet, which was responsible for Russia’s nuclear defence, was based on the Kola Peninsula, Russia, near the border with Norway. At the same time, Russia’s state-controlled energy company Rosneft had pushed forward with its Vostok Oil project, a vast Arctic development through which Moscow aimed to boost oil production. Russia recently began exporting oil from the project commercially.
Much of Russia’s oil was exported by its shadow fleet, a network of sanctioned tankers that operated from the Russian Arctic. The fleet had expanded rapidly since 2022, with some of its vessels suspected of engaging in spying and sabotage in European waters.
The Finnish prime minister, Petteri Orpo, told the dignitaries gathered in Rovaniemi that: “Russia is the most significant threat” to the European Arctic. He added that there was a high demand for: “concrete action from the EU.” But what form should this action take?
There were two main priority areas. First, Europe needed to boost its capacity to monitor and react to Russian activities in the Arctic. Intelligence gathering, surveillance, and reconnaissance remained a key challenge in the High North, primarily due to the existence of satellite communication gaps at high latitudes. Located north of Norway and Russia, the Barents Sea was also a hotspot for GPS jamming and what is known as spoofing, where vessels or aircraft broadcast fake navigation data to hide their true location. This made the maritime and aerial environment in the region unsafe.
Nato invested in two systems designed to improve satellite coverage across the Arctic region. These included the Alliance Persistence Surveillance from the Space programme and Northlink, both of which draw on commercial and government space assets. But, in general, there was still a pressing need for Europe to invest in more sensor networks and uncrewed systems to monitor Arctic waters.
The second priority was to bolster the physical presence of EU states in the Arctic. Third-party Nato states such as the UK already worked closely with Iceland and Norway, two of the EU’s key Arctic partners. There were 1,500 Royal Marines stationed at Camp Viking in northern Norway alone.
At the meeting in Rovaniemi, Orpo suggested that the EU fund a European fleet of icebreakers, the vessels required to access and navigate much of the Arctic. Finland had a key role to play here. Around 80 per cent of the world’s icebreakers are currently designed by Finnish firms, and more than 60 per cent are built in Finnish shipyards.
Trade, resources, and energy
Protecting Europe against Russian threats was perhaps the core driver of the desire to strengthen the EU’s Arctic presence. But EU leadership also recognised that the Arctic was undergoing environmental change. This change would inevitably necessitate more activity in the region, beyond mere deterrence.
As sea ice melted due to rising temperatures and shipping routes elsewhere became more precarious, including around the Red Sea, the temptation to use Arctic waters to move goods between markets in Europe and Asia grew. Chinese and South Korean vessels had already undertaken summer season crossings using this route.
Moving forward, the EU’s resource and energy strategy would also depend heavily on the European Arctic. This was despite the bloc announcing on September 21 that it would maintain its ban on new oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. The Nordic region holds massive reserves of iron, copper, cobalt, nickel, and rare-earth elements. So, with the EU’s target of securing 10 per cent of its strategic raw material needs from domestic sources by 2030, mining in European Arctic states such as Sweden and Finland would be essential for strategic independence.
Courting Greenland, a resource-rich autonomous territory of Denmark that recently signed a deal with the US that allowed Washington to build two military bases there, is another element of this. The EU had allocated a 200 million euro (£171 million pounds) investment package across 2026 and 2027 to support clean energy and the mining of critical raw materials in Greenland. Visiting Greenland in September, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said the funding would: “create new opportunities”. The hope is that hundreds of millions of euros will follow for resource-related projects in the territory.
The Arctic had become a geopolitical frontier, and EU leaders were scrambling to ensure they were not left behind.
This article was originally published by The Conversation and can be found here.