GURULYOV: The events of the past few days have been, if not quick— we have to admit that a war in the Arctic has already begun in fact. We have talked about this many times here, and I’ve always seen the Arctic threat as one of the greatest.
NARRATOR: On January 13th, during a broadcast[1] by Russian TV channel Rossiya 1, member of the State Duma Committee on Defense Andrei Gurulyov said that Russia should establish a military base on Svalbard. He stated that this would strengthen Russia’s strategic position in the Arctic and secure the country’s interests in the region.
GURULYOV: Svalbard is today extremely important for us, it’s right next to our Northern Fleet. I think we need to go from joint development to purely Russian solutions. We can have very good bases there to influence the whole Arctic region which exists today.
NARRATOR: These proposals violate the Svalbard Treaty, which forbids military activity on the island[2]. Russia’s ambassador to Norway, Nikolai Korchunov, said to Dagbladet that proposals and opinions from individual Russian politicians do not necessarily reflect the government’s stances[3]. Korchunov denies that the establishment of military bases on Svalbard is anything under current serious discussion. He underlines that Russia’s official Arctic policy revolves around preserving the region as a peaceful region for cooperation, in accordance with international law.
Translated transcription of the Russian Ambassador's e-mail to Dagbladet
Thank you for your inquiry.
The following is a response from Russia’s Ambassador Nikolai Korchunov:
Different opinions and proposals on matters of foreign and security policy are expressed in Russia also by parliamentarians, who sometimes contradict one another, but the determining voice has always been the President’s as expressed in the documents on the Arctic that he has approved, among others Foundations of The Russian Federation’s State Policy in the Arctic up to 2035 and Strategy for Development of the Russian Federation’s Arctic Region up to 2035, which concern the need to preserve the Arctic as a peaceful region benefitting from mutual cooperation with Arctic states based in international law, also on Svalbard — on equally and mutually beneficial cooperative terms with Norway. These documents, which apply directly to all government institutions, including the Ministry of Defense, do not assume [a right/need to the?] establishment of military bases on the territory of other states in the region.
Kind regards,
Russia’s Embassy in Norway
According to The Barents Observer, the program was Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, a socio-political talk show. ↩︎
This is a very peculiar phrasing by a bourgeois Norwegian source, given that the whole source of the Svalbard conflict is precisely that Norway interprets the Svalbard Treaty as permitting military activity on the archipelago. What the treaty forbids as such is the use of the archipelago for “warlike purposes”, and the construction of military bases there: Norway maintains that it has a right to a military presence on the archipelago, since Svalbard is Norway’s sovereign territory and Norway accordingly has a natural right and need to defend it; Russia on the contrary holds that any military presence on the archipelago is warlike. ↩︎
Gurulyov is apparently known for making statements (apparently specifically on Evening with Vladimir Solovyov) which are taken as inflammatory or bizarre, and which ultimately don’t amount to anything but footnotes at the bottom of his Wikipedia article. A few Hexbears have discussed some of his previous remarks: in one, he stated that in the case of a Third World War, Russia would bomb London first, followed by Paris, Berlin, or Warsaw; in another, he apparently encouraged Russia to launch missile strikes against the UK to eradicate the Royal Family. In the same broadcast as his remarks on Svalbard, he also said, “Trump is declaring his claims to Greenland. Why shouldn’t we look at Greenland? We need Greenland! This is not a joke. We absolutely need it! At the very least, we could make a deal with Trump and split Greenland into a couple of pieces. It is clear that Denmark will never be there again.” (Barents Observer, Newsweek) — and he also said, “Today, we need to clearly increase the military component in the Arctic, based on the conditions that are taking place, including in Ukraine. We are only looking at Ukraine, aren’t we? The Arctic is a second and larger issue that has already begun, and we need to sit down and clearly calculate everything. War, we’ve always said, is math. We have to sit down and do the math. The main thing is to build a proper defense there. We need to build such a defense that no one will think of sticking their heads into our what? The Arctic …” (Newsweek) — the theme of that week’s episode of Vladimir Solovyov was apparently Trump Jr’s visit to Greenland and its consequences. ↩︎
Warmongering fuck trying to counter Trump’s expansionist arctic colonialism with his own. Good thing this guy is all rhetoric by the looks of things. But Jesus Christ there is no place for this reactionary hawkish mindset in a nuclear world, find another place for your arctic bases because every conflict with a “great” power brings us right up to the brink of hell.
