Arctic security is moving to sea
Russian activity around critical infrastructure, a rapidly changing Arctic Ocean and growing military cooperation in the High North dominated the third Arctic Security Conference, hosted by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo on 16 September.
Watch the full recording at FNIs Youtube channel.
Around 400 participants gathered in Oslo for the third Arctic Security Conference, twice as many as the previous year. This year's conference focused specifically on maritime security and hybrid threats at sea.
‘With greater interest in the Arctic also comes a greater need for knowledge,’ said FNI Research Director Andreas Østhagen as he opened the conference together with FNI researcher Iselin Nemeth Winther.
Rather than trying to cover every aspect of Arctic security, the conference brought together politicians, military leaders, researchers, industry representatives and practitioners to examine what changing security conditions mean at sea.
Russia is developing capabilities below the threshold of war
Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs Espen Barth Eide opened the first session by describing an Arctic increasingly affected by geopolitical competition, while stressing the importance of combining stronger deterrence with predictability. One of the most pressing challenges, he said, lies below NATO's Article 5 threshold.
Eide said Norway and its closest partners know that Russia is developing capabilities that could be used to create serious disruption to communication lines and other subsea infrastructure.
Making more of this information public is itself part of the response, he argued: demonstrating that such activity is being observed can contribute to deterrence.
At the same time, Eide cautioned against treating Russia and China as a single Arctic challenge. China is a growing global power with expanding scientific, commercial and strategic interests in the region, he said, but the two countries have different interests and trajectories.
A changing ocean does not mean an ice-free ocean
Climate change formed the backdrop to many of the day's security discussions. A session on an ‘ice-free Arctic Ocean’ challenged one of the most common assumptions about the region. In scientific terms, an ice-free Arctic does not mean an ocean without ice, but sea-ice cover falling below one million square kilometres at the annual minimum.
Less and more mobile ice may in some cases make navigation less predictable rather than simply easier.Researchers and maritime practitioners discussed growing shipping and tourism, emergency preparedness, environmental risks and the need for better knowledge of the Central Arctic Ocean.
In a film shown during the session, Paul Dodd of the Norwegian Polar Institute described findings from the Arctic Ocean 2050 expedition he had just led to the North Pole. Marine traffic across the Arctic Ocean as a whole has increased by around 12 per cent annually, he said. Commercial activity in the central Arctic Ocean, however, remains limited. Scientific knowledge about the ecosystems that may be affected is also incomplete. Decisions on future protection and management will therefore have to be made while the region itself is changing rapidly.
Hybrid threats: the difficult space between peace and war
The afternoon shifted from climate and access to critical infrastructure and hybrid threats. Using incidents in the Baltic Sea as a starting point, researchers, military representatives and industry experts discussed the difficulty of attribution: determining whether damage or suspicious activity is accidental, criminal or state-directed.
The challenge is not simply that infrastructure cannot all be physically protected. Hybrid activity is deliberately designed to exploit uncertainty about intent and responsibility.
FNI PhD Research Fellow Erdem Lamazhapov stressed that intent is central to understanding what constitutes a hybrid threat, while FNI researcher Serafima Andreeva drew attention to the danger of using ‘hybrid threats’ as an overly broad category. Different activities require different responses.
The discussions also pointed towards a wider question: whether European countries have developed adequate responses to hostile activity that is serious, but remains below the threshold of conventional military conflict.
The next session turned to the partnerships needed to respond. Ine Eriksen Søreide, leader of Norway’s Conservative Party and a former foreign and defence minister, pointed to a possible weakness in that cooperation. Allied military activity in the High North is growing, she said, but NATO also needs political unity to remain credible.
She warned that repeated challenges to that unity, particularly over Greenland, could undermine an alliance that is stronger militarily than it has ever been.
‘This is not research’
The final session brought the discussion back to threats at sea. Norwegian State Secretary for Defence Marte Gerhardsen pointed to recent activity by GUGI, the Russian military’s Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, in and near Norwegian and British waters.
‘This is not research,’ Gerhardsen said, describing it as development of a capability to sabotage Western critical infrastructure at great depths. She said Norway had made clear to Russia that attempts to target critical infrastructure would be detected and met with consequences.
The changing security environment is also accelerating cooperation among allies. US Coast Guard Rear Admiral Bob Little described a move towards a more continuous American presence in the Arctic and plans to expand the US icebreaker fleet. British, Finnish and NATO representatives similarly highlighted increasingly integrated allied activity across the High North.
The Nordic dimension has changed particularly rapidly since Finland and Sweden joined NATO. Gerhardsen said Norway's ambition is for the Nordic countries to become the most closely integrated group within the alliance.
Lessons from Ukraine reach the Arctic
The final contribution brought the discussion from the Arctic to the Black Sea. Tetiana Ostra of Ukraine's Boryviter Centre of Excellence described how Ukraine, despite lacking a conventional fleet capable of matching Russia's Black Sea Fleet, has combined intelligence, missiles and uncrewed systems to constrain Russian naval operations.
She highlighted what she described as the first combat engagement in which one naval drone destroyed another naval drone, on 12 September. The Ukrainian system used a Norwegian Kongsberg remote weapon station.
For Ostra, the episode shows how maritime power is changing, and how in the future it will increasingly depend on the ability to combine sensors, intelligence, decision-making and crewed and uncrewed systems faster than the enemy.
The Arctic is not the Black Sea, she stressed. Distances are greater, conditions harsher and communications more difficult. But some of the operational lessons are already relevant to how Arctic states think about surveillance, critical infrastructure and sea denial.
From describing the problem to deciding what to do
Across five sessions, one theme repeatedly resurfaced: Arctic security is no longer primarily a question of recognising that the region is becoming more strategically important. The harder questions now concern responses. How should states respond to hostile activity below the threshold of armed conflict? How can infrastructure spread across enormous maritime areas be protected? What does deterrence mean in practice? And how can increased military activity coexist with environmental protection, civilian activity and the communities that live in the North?
Those questions will also form part of the research agenda at FNI, including through projects on maritime hybrid threats, Arctic governance and the Arctic Ocean towards 2050.
The Arctic Security Conference is organised by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute under the framework of the Norwegian Centre for Geopolitics, with support from research projects, partners and the Norwegian Ministry of Defence.
