Russia's Arctic Ambitions

Recent comments by Lawrence Cannon suggest that Canada is underestimating the Russian threat.

Though Canada often has the reputation of being the world's boy scout seeking the approval of others for its moral conduct, it also has a sense of healthy chauvinism when it comes to defending its sovereignty. However, Russia’s push to claim an enormous slice of the Arctic region over the past few years has put these two national personalities to the test.

It is disheartening to see that Canada’s current reaction to Russia's string of provocations, from flag planting to dropping paratroopers into the disputed territory, has been reckless non-nonchalance. In comments made last week and quoted in the Globe and Mail, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon displayed what is in my opinion a deep misunderstanding of Kremlin motives: "I don't take this Russian initiative very seriously," he said. "It seemed to me that the Russians were just pulling stunts."

I have for some time urged the Canadian government to thoughtfully study the Russian approach to the Arctic, a policy that, under the direction of Igor Sechin and others, represents a far greater threat to Canadian interests than Cannon appears to realize.

These gestures are much more meaningful than simple stunts. Last week, I had the opportunity to call a friend and colleague in Moscow, Vladimir Gladyshev, who is an international lawyer and expert on Russia's approach to territorial issues. Gladyshev had the following to say on Cannon's remarks to the Globe and Mail:

There are two levels to the . One is ostensibly the tug-of-war on the outer limits of the national continental shelves of the Russian Federation and Canada.

In principle, any temporary physical actions, either by Russia or Canada, are irrelevant to the considerations of the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which works on the basis of the complex political-geographical-geological formula of UNCLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). Stunts like paratroopers and submarine launches do not affect such deliberations.

However, a deeper and unarticulated agenda is at work. There is the competition between the creeping jurisdictions of Arctic countries, with Canada and Russia at the front.

UNCLOS, signed in 1982, included the so-called Canadian article, inserted at the insistence of the Canadian delegation, which gave Arctic countries powers to regulate international shipping in the 200-mile exclusive economic zone off their coasts, even if that area was covered with ice.

The Soviet Union however, dissatisfied with what it considered to be the too modest reach of the Canadian article, strived to extend, step by step, its full sovereignty over the entire "Soviet Arctic Sector," as described in the Supreme Soviet decree of 1926, which claimed all territory between the shores of the USSR and the North Pole.

The main impediment for extending full sovereignty during the Cold War era was not the complex and clever formulas of UNCLOS (which strived to reconcile various maritime interests through heavy reliance on constructive ambiguity), but the strategic games of the superpowers. Both the United States and Russia were interested in unimpeded passage under the ice of the Arctic Ocean for their nuclear submarines as an important part of strategic nuclear deterrence. But since this particular concern is now basically non-existent, it no longer impedes a rapid proliferation of creeping national jurisdiction over the Arctic region.

Since Arctic players are left with sundry and often incompatible bits of legal regimes, policy positions, and conflicting interests – some left over from the previous decades, some brand new – symbolic gestures may in fact have more that symbolic value. Indeed, they may plausibly tip the scales of negotiations over the future of Arctic to one or the other country.

So the question is: should the foreign ministries of the Arctic countries be left to hammer out a legal regime for the region quietly (while regaling the public with publicity stunts), or is the topic too important to be left without input from industrial and environmental actors?