56 TIME May 23/May 30, 2022
Coast Guard, worries that the Russians might try
to recoup their investment in icebreakers by turn-
ing the Northern Sea Route into a kind of marine
toll road, requiring—and charging for—specially
licensed pilots and icebreaker escorts through
the passage. “If you can knock 10, 11 days off the
transit between Shanghai and Europe on a repeti-
tive basis and in a cost- effective way, that’s worth
something,” he tells TIME. “Of course they want
to profit from that.” But doing so threatens one of
the fundamental tenets of the high seas: the free-
dom to navigate.
Russia isn’t just building up ports. For the past
decade, the country’s leaders have increasingly
voiced their desire to make the Arctic a sphere
of military and economic expansion, to counter
what they perceive as U.S. and NATO challenges
to Russian interests in the region. Satellite imag-
ery released in April 2021 showed Russia expand-
ing its military capabilities in the Arctic by build-
ing new bases and modernizing existing ones. In
August, the northern fleet of the Russian navy
undertook a series of military drills involving at
least 10,000 personnel on a marine battalion’s
worth of combat ships, submarines, support ves-
sels, and aircraft. The Russian state media agency
Tass has leaked government plans to establish a
new navy division, dubbed the Arctic Fleet, which
would be responsible for securing the country’s
Arctic interests. “It absolutely makes me a lit-
tle bit concerned about what’s going on,” says
Schultz. He was speaking from the deck of the
U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy as it transited the
Canadian Arctic in August. The 23-year-old Healy
is the U.S.’s most technologically advanced ice-
breaker. The country has only one other, and it is
nearly 50 years old. If the U.S. is to keep pace with
Russia in the Arctic, says Schultz, it will need to
increase its Arctic- capable fleet. “Presence equals
influence. And we don’t have a lot of presence
up here.”
Influence will matter when it comes to control
of the region’s petroleum reserves, seabed min-
erals, and—in a newer development—seafood.
Warming oceans are pushing global fish stocks
northward, into polar areas where rival nations
could clash over fishing rights. The Bering Sea,
shared by Russia and the U.S., is already home to
approximately 40% of U.S. fish and crab stocks,
and rivals New England for the most profitable
U.S. fishery. This could become an unexpected
flash point as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ratch-
ets up tensions with the U.S. Jeremy Greenwood, a
fellow with the Brookings Institution in Washing-
ton, D.C., and a U.S. Coast Guard officer, isn’t ex-
pecting a hot conflict, but he is concerned that Rus-
sia might infringe on a maritime boundary that,
while negotiated, was never formally agreed to by
the former Soviet Union. “The Russians have al-
ways hated it,” Greenwood says. An infringement
“would lead to chaos in the Bering Sea. We’d be
seizing each other’s vessels for illegal fishing. I
know it sounds stupid to talk about crabs in the
context of Ukraine, but countries have literally
gone to shooting wars over fisheries. It brought
us to the brink during the Cold War. It’s a big deal.”
The Alaskan fishing fleet got a glimpse of what
that could look like in August 2020, when the Rus-
sian navy conducted military operations inside the
U.S. economic zone of the Bering Sea and warned
all boats in the area to get out of their way. The
U.S. Navy responded, belatedly, by conducting its
own operations inside the Arctic Circle in March. It
called the exercises Regaining Arctic Dominance.△
YUP’IK
ELDER BETTY
ANAGICK,
94, SAYS
CLIMATE
CHANGE HAS
OVERTURNED
TRADITIONAL
LIFE IN
UNALAKLEET,
ALASKA