Two years earlier, Moscow brought war games of its own through the Bering Sea, with Russian commanders testing weapons and demanding that American fishing boats operating in American fishing waters move out of the way. Go – an order the US Coast Guard advised them to follow. Russia has repeatedly sent military planes to the edge of US airspace, prompting US jets to scramble to stop them and warn them.
This month, in response to mounting international sanctions against Russia, a member of the Russian parliament demanded that Alaska, purchased by the United States from Russia in 1867, be returned to Russian control—a potentially rhetorical gesture that nonetheless worsened. shows relationships. Two world powers.
For centuries, the vast waters of the offshore Arctic were largely not one man’s land closed by ice, whose precise territorial boundaries—claimed by the United States, Russia, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland—remain unstable. But as melting sea ice has opened up new shipping avenues and nations look at vast hydrocarbon and mineral deposits beneath the Arctic sea floor, The complex treaties, claims and border areas governing the region have been opened to new disputes.
Canada and the United States have never reached an agreement on the position of the Northwest Passage between the North Atlantic and the Beaufort Sea. China, too, is working to gain a foothold, declaring itself a “near-Arctic state” and partnering with Russia to promote “sustainable” development and expanded use of the Arctic trade routes.
Russia has made it clear that it intends to control the so-called Northern Sea Route from its northern coast, a route that significantly shortens shipping distances between China and northern Europe. US officials have complained that Russia is illegally soliciting other nations to allow passage and threatening to use military force to sink ships that do not comply.
“We’re stuck in a very tense situation there,” said Troy Bouffard, director of the Center for Arctic Security and Resilience at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “Either we acknowledge Russia for their excessive control over surface waters, or we escalate or escalate the issue.”
