Ukraine’s supposed strike on the Olenya airbase south of Murmansk in July 2024 is a stark reminder that the Arctic, far from isolated, has been ensnared in global conflicts for centuries.
If the reports are to be believed, in July 2024, a Ukrainian drone attacked a Russian bomber at the Olenya air base just 92 kilometers south of Murmansk, the world’s largest city north of the Arctic Circle. Though not confirmed by independent sources, according to newspaper Ukrainian Pravda, Ukraine’s intelligence service had stated, “As a result of the operation of the GUR of the Ministry of Defense near Olenegorsk at the military airfield Olenya at the base of the strategic aviation of the Russian occupiers, a long-range supersonic bomber-missile carrier TU-22M3 was hit.”
The surprise attack would have taken place 1,800 kilometers north of Ukraine’s border with Russia – an enormous distance for a drone to fly on autopilot without being neither detected nor shot down. In June, the Ukrainian Defense Industry announced that it had started regular production of drones with ranges over 1,000 km. The month prior, Russia claimed (and the Ukrainian military intelligence agency later confirmed) that Ukrainian drones had attempted to attack its military facilities in the Tatarstan Republic, 1,100 km away from the front lines.
Yet the Olenya air field is 63% farther away than Ukraine’s targets in Tatarstan. While it may be possible that Ukraine could have initiated the drone strike on Olenya from within its own borders, saboteurs located within Russia, closer to the Arctic target, could have also launched the deadly device.
Ukraine has good reason for firing at Olenya air base, for Russian bombers and fighter jets regularly take off from there for Ukraine. The Barents Observer reported that on at least two separate occasions in early January 2024, nine Russian Tu-95 strategic bombers took off from the Arctic facility, striking civilian targets in Ukraine including the city of Kharkiv. In response to the first attack on January 2, one Ukrainian sympathizer commented, “I wish the same [missiles] was dropped over Murmansk.”
Regardless of whether a Ukrainian drone really made it to Olenya, the incident is changing narratives about the Arctic, long seen as isolated from the rest of the world, by making two things clears. First, the Arctic is an integral revenue source and staging ground for Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor. Second, the Arctic is not a special snow globe immune from conflicts elsewhere.
The Arctic’s crucial role in Russia’s war in Ukraine
Russia’s long-running war in Ukraine has involved the Arctic in complex ways since the little green men first showed up in Crimea in 2014. It’s hard to believe it now, but just ten years ago, U.S. company ExxonMobil was jointly cooperating with Russian state-owned Rosneft to prospect for oil in the Kara Sea, in between the gas-rich Yamal Peninsula and Novaya Zemlya. (As an aside that also attests to the exploitation of Arctic lands and peoples to pursue planetary violence, the Indigenous Nenets people were forcibly removed from the archipelago so that the Soviet Union could carry out nuclear testing – including, eventually, of the world’s largest-ever nuclear bomb, Tsar Bomba). Together, the U.S. and Russian companies drilled one well, Universitetskaya, which was estimated to hold at least 125 million tons of oil.
While ExxonMobil abandoned its cooperation with Rosneft later in 2014 due to US sanctions on Russian oil and gas companies, Russia has pushed forward with developing its polar resources. A growing amount of the country’s oil and gas exports, whose revenues have funded 30-50% of the federal budget each year for the past decade, comes from northern fields. Without the extraction of Arctic fossil fuels, Russia’s ongoing war would be difficult to finance. To keep the black gold going, the Kremlin is pushing five new oil projects along the continental shelf including Vostok Oil, which is planned to ship 100 million barrels annually via the Northern Sea Route by 2030. In turn, these projects will support the federal government’s goal to make hydrocarbons the main cargo carried along the Northern Sea Route in accordance with the Development Plan of the Northern Sea Route until 2035. The Northern Sea Route is no longer being sold as an international transport shortcut, but as an outlet for Russian fossil fuels to reach Asian markets – the revenues from which support Putin’s revanchism.
Russia is not only prospecting in the Arctic. Ominously, in May 2024, Russia announced it had discovered reserves containing 511 billion barrels of oil in the British Antarctic Territory. While the Antarctic Treaty System prohibits mineral exploration, starting in 2048, its consultative parties can request a review of the agreement. It might sound outlandish for the Russian petrostate to set oil and gas development in both polar regions in its sights. But it is worth recalling that in the 20th century, industrial Soviet whalers illegally pursued their peaceful prey to both ends of the Earth, pushing the populations of Southern Ocean humpback whales and North Pacific right whales close to extinction.
Russia is also using people from its northern regions to do its dirty work in Ukraine. Putin’s “partial mobilization” has sent men from regions like Krasnoyarsk Krai to the front. Entire prisons in the Russian Arctic are being shut as many of their inmates have been recruited to fight in either the military or for Wagner Group, the infamous paramilitary group.
One company active in the Russian Arctic even has its own private military. State-owned Gazprom Neft, the oil producing division of Gazprom, established a “private security organization” in 2022 with the Kremlin’s backing, supposedly to protect its Arctic assets. Yet the organization’s mercenaries have been fighting in Ukraine under the leadership of the former police chief of Arkhangelsk, which lies next to Murmansk oblast in northwest Russia.
Should they survive, the roughnecks-turned-combatants are guaranteed their jobs when they return to the gas fields, according to the Financial Times. With Russia’s oil and gas fields owned by corrupt oligarchs and staffed by Ukraine war veterans, some of whom may have committed human rights violations, the perpetrators of both organized crime and crimes against humanity have made their bloody bed in the Arctic.
Last but not least, worth mentioning is the village of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, which holds 80% of the country’s gas reserves. Though named after the Khanty word for the northern lights, it is a dark place. At the tail end of the polar night in February, Russian dissident Alexei Navalny died in the town’s hellish IK-3 prison, meant for Russia’s worst prisoners. Fittingly, Kharp is a stone’s throw, in Siberian terms, from Vorkuta, where 50 gulag camps imprisoned 50,000 people in Soviet times. Non-prisoner visitors to Kharp can enjoy rafting tours on the aptly named Sob River, which runs next to the village.
Navalny could only relish his compulsory morning workouts and solitary strolls, during the last of which he died. In January, he quipped on X/Twitter:
“Today I went for a walk, froze, and thought of Leonardo DiCaprio and his character’s dead horse trick in the movie “The Revenant.” I do not think that it would have worked here. A dead horse would freeze to death in about 15 minutes. Here you need an elephant. A hot or even roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot, roasted elephant in Yamal, especilly at 6:30 in the morning? So I will continue to freeze. 😉”
The Arctic has long been embroiled in global conflicts
The Ukrainian drone strike, if real, also confirms the “death of Arctic exceptionalism,” as I wrote in a blog post last October. Long before the Cold War ended, many Arctic state officials, civil society members, and scholars believed that the border-spanning challenges of the region, from polar bear conservation (first tackled jointly by the five Arctic coastal states with The 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears) to climate change and Indigenous well-being would inspire circumpolar cooperation. Implementing ecosystem-level management of the Arctic required countries like the U.S. and Soviet Union, and later Russia, to set aside differences they held elsewhere.
The past 50 years of relative peace in the Arctic, however, are anomalous when situated within the sweep of world history. Three little-known conflicts exemplify the long insertion of Arctic locales into global crosshairs: the Turkish Raid in 1627, the Arctic theatres of the Crimean War in 1854, and the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands in 1942.
The Turkish Raid: Barbary Coast pirates attack and enslave 400 Icelanders in 1627
In 1627, a dozen Barbary pirate vessels, set sail from Algier and Salé on the north coast of Africa, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Four of the vessels, one of which was captained by the Dutch pirate-turned-Barbary corsair Jan Janzoon van Haarlem (also known as Reis Mourad the Younger) headed for a poorly defended Iceland, where they brutally attacked villages in the eastern fjords and on the Westman Islands.
Nearly 50 hapless Icelanders were killed while 400 were brought back to the Barbary Coast, where they were sold as slaves and concubines. A decade after the raids, 50 Icelandic slaves eventually made their way back from North Africa after ransoms were paid for them. While these were largely financed by the Danish king, even common Icelanders had sent money in 1632 to try to free their captured countrymen.
With Iceland long being a country full of people writing things down, in 1643, a scholar named Björn Jónsson detailed the gruesome horrors of the Turkish raids, or Tyrkjaránið, as they are known in Icelandic. One of the less graphic passages in the saga describes: “A merchant approached them there with a few men and fired at the Turks with a handgun, but they reacted with screams and shouts, and waving their head cloths, they ran all the more excitedly onto land. The people on the island then saw that it was no use to resist and so they all fled away.” Such was the multigenerational trauma that for centuries afterwards, Icelanders would be suspicious of foreign vessels. One could argue that the Turkish abductions broke Icelanders’ own sense of exceptionalism.
The Crimean War: British and French naval ships attack Russian ships in the northern port of Petropavlovsk in 1854
The Crimean War is typically remembered as taking place on, naturally, the Crimean Peninsula. As the Ottoman Empire was declining, Russia, which had been expanding since the sixteenth century, looked to advance its southwestern frontier. What initially started as the Russo-Turkish War soon embroiled France, the United Kingdom, and Sardinia as they allied with the Ottomans, using disputes over the protection of Christians in Palestine as a pretext. (The parallels with today’s world events are almost uncanny).
While most of the battles took place in Europe, a series of skirmishes pushed to Russia’s northwestern and eastern edges, all the way to the White Sea and the Kamchatka Peninsula in the North Pacific Arctic.
The White Sea theatre of the Crimean War
First, in August 1854, the British sent Royal Navy squadron of one frigate and two steam sloops to the White Sea, where the English had been trading since the 16th century with cities such as Arkhangelsk. The squadron’s captain, Erasmus Ommanney, had experience sailing in the Arctic. Four years prior, he served as second-in-command on an expedition dispatched to search for Erebus and Terror, two state-of-the-art vessels that had gone missing while they were trying to navigate the last unexplored sections of the Northwest Passage. Ommanney’s polar experience did not spell success in the White Sea theatre, however.
The squadron first sailed to the Solovetsky Islands, where they bombarded the large fortified monastery for several days with little to show for it. Failing to seize the enormous structure, which I visited in 2015, the two steam sloops sailed away and up the Kola River, passing the city of Murmansk to anchor off the garrison town of Kola.
As Antoine Vanner details in his informative blog post, the British demanded a surrender of the garrison and government property. When no response from the Russians was received, the British opened fire and set government buildings ablaze before retreating to England, with little to claim for their efforts save battle experience in the Arctic.
The North Pacific theatre of the Crimean War
At almost exactly the same time as the White Sea theatre was unfolding, the British and French were attacking Russian vessels in the North Pacific. At the time, Russia and the United States had cordial relations, with historian Ivan Kurilla describing their relationship as one of “partners across the ocean.” The two countries regularly encountered one another due to the Russian presence in Alaska stretching all the way down to Fort Ross, California. To protect their commercial interests from conflict, in 1839, Russia and the U.S. agreed that in the case of war, they would proclaim neutrality over the entire Northwest Coast.
Britain and France, which were also major powers in North America, had other ideas. They were concerned about protecting their lucrative trade with California from the Russians. While the British respected the Northwest’s neutrality, they did so only on land. At sea, for the British and soon to follow the French, Russian vessels were fair game. In the mid-nineteenth century, Britain was an aggressive imperial power. In 1839, it had invaded China and occupied Hong Kong, marking the start of the First Opium War. Russia, fearful that Britain sought to dominate the Pacific Ocean, began reinforcing its eastern coastline.
In August 1854, British and French vessels that had been stationed in Callao, Peru set off for Honolulu, Hawaii in hot pursuit of Russian vessels. Believing one frigate had left for Sitka, Alaska, they headed due north from Kamehameha III’s kingdom. Some, however, thought that the Russian ship would quickly fall prey to English and French whalers in the Sea of Okhotsk or Bering Strait, as one newspaper correspondent reported from San Francisco.
Other sailors held out hope of an encounter. A sailor aboard HMS President wrote on July 28, 1874:
“We are now going to a very trying part of the globe – Sitka, a Russian fur settlement, which is in a very high northern latitude, and the weather is very severe there. We are in hopes of meeting the Russian squadron there, and of ascertaining whether we are to have any fighting or prize-money. Should it turn out nothing is to be done there, we shall, doubtless, proceed to Petropaulovski, another settlement on the coast of Kamtschatka, where the Russian ships will doubtless be.”
As they ultimately found no Russian ships in the fur-trading port of Sitka, the British and French sailed west to Petropavlovsk (now Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky), a key Russian fort. Here, they found Russian vessels, and a battle ensued.
The Siege of Petropavlovsk lasted for about a week, with the Allied forces failing to take Petropavlovsk. With their tails between their legs, the British sailed back across the Pacific to Victoria, and the French to San Francisco. While the forces would return again in the spring, they found that the Russians had sailed left, bringing the North Pacific Arctic theatre of the Crimean War to an anticlimatic end. A British tricolor lost in the siege floated onshore, which the Russians retrieved. To this day, it hangs in the Kamchatka Regional United Museum.
The Japanese invasion of Attu: 41 Aleuts are captured and sent to a prison camp in Hokkaido in 1942
World War II was a truly global conflict, with theatres stretching from the South Pacific to northern Scandinavia. Often forgotten, though, is the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands in June 1942 – the only land battle to occur on U.S. territory. With Pearl Harbor having been bombed seven months prior, the U.S. had been on high alert that the Japanese might carry out attacks in Alaska. They evacuated 900 Aleut (Unangax̂) from villages across the island chand to southeast Alaska, burning the emptied villages so that nothing would be left to the Japanese. (Notably, the European Americans living on the Aleutian Islands were not forced to evacuate). The burning of the villages also meant that little would be left for the Aleuts when they would finally be permitted to return home after the war. During their internment, the Aleuts endured horrific living conditions, cramped together in one instance in a former fish cannery with neither proper sewage treatment nor clean water.
The U.S. strategy failed to deter the Japanese. The enemy forces successfully invaded and occupied the islands of Kiska, which was little inhabited save for a U.S. weather station, and Attu, which had not been evacuated, and which still had dozens of residents and even a Russian Orthodox Church.
The Japanese took the 42 Aleut who survived the initial invasion as prisoners of war, bringing them to Hokkaido. On the snowy island, the Aleut lived in requisitioned private houses and were closely watched by police. Many already were infected with tuberculosis, which their high-fat, high-calorie diets at home had helped keep under control. Yet forced to switch to a Japanese diet, many succumbed to their illness. In total, 16 imprisoned Aleuts died. In addition, tragically, five babies were born, but only one survived.
The Aleuts who eventually made it back to the U.S. were not allowed to go back to Attu, as the U.S. did not want to pay to rebuild their homes there. Instead, they were forced to live on Atka, an island 500 miles to the west where other Aleuts that the U.S. had interred were already living.
In 1988, the U.S. apologized for its actions against the Aleut in World War II. Each surviving Aleut who had been imprisoned by the U.S. received $12,000, and a $5 million trust fund was set up under the Department of the Interior. The Aleut Corporation received $15 million in compensation for Attu Island, which remains uninhabited to this day save for giant rats whose origins trace to a shipwrecked Japanese vessel in the 1970s. The Aleuts taken prisoner by the Japanese received no such compensation, for they were taken by the enemy.
The last surviving Aleut prisoner of war, and the last surviving resident of Attu, Gregory Golodoff, died in December 2023. His surname reflects the centuries of Russian presence in the Aleutian Islands. Taken as a young child, Golodoff recalled that the cooks treated him like a “pet.” He said, “I was a cute little guy, I guess, because a Japanese cook scraped burned rice from the pot and would bring it to me.” In interviews, Golodoff seems to hold little animosity towards his captors, who he recognized were starving, too. He led by all accounts a successful life after being resettled in Atka, joining the U.S. military, running the village store, and becoming tribal president in the 1980s.
Golodoff’s life, in many ways, encapsulates the web of connections both violent and life-giving between the northern latitudes and the rest of the world. Since humans first settled northern Siberia 32,000 years ago, the Arctic has been a part of global currents. Ukraine’s drone strike on a northern Russian air field is a wartime reminder of this.
