There are no outward signs of jitters, at least not yet: People in Svalbard are going about their daily lives as normal despite speculation that this Norwegian archipelago could be the next arctic territory coveted by the US or Russia.
“Today Greenland, tomorrow Svalbard?” a question Longyearbyen Mayor Terje Aunevik said he has been asked many times.
US President Donald Trump’s expansionist ambitions have turned the global spotlight on the arctic, where geostrategic and financial stakes are mounting.
Photo: AFP
“The arctic is no longer a quiet corner on the map,” EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy told a conference in Tromso in northern Norway early this month. “It is the front line of the global power competition.”
Longyearbyen, the main town on Svalbard, is an unusual place. A former mining community turned tourist destination and academic hot spot, it lies in the fastest-warming region on the planet. One of the northernmost towns in the world, located halfway between continental Norway and the North Pole, Longyearbyen is home to 2,500 people.
It is plunged in darkness with no sun for four months in winter, then bathed in round-the-clock daylight in summer.
Venturing outside the town means carrying a mandatory rifle in case of encounters with polar bears.
Some political observers have suggested that Trump’s desire to control the arctic might extend beyond Greenland to Svalbard, or that Russia might want to match his appetite and seize the archipelago.
In addition to the riches believed to lie under its seabed, Svalbard — twice the size of Belgium — is strategically located, controlling the northern part of the so-called “Bear Gap.”
The military term refers to the maritime zone where the Barents Sea meets the Norwegian Sea. It is this zone that the Russian Northern Fleet missile-launching submarines based on the Kola Peninsula must cross to disappear into the deep waters of the Atlantic.
Svalbard’s “strategic relevance does not necessarily lie in the island itself, but in the waters around it,” said Barbara Kunz, director of the European Security Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
“Russia wants to protect its nuclear deterrence, and so it wants to make sure that nobody can approach its northern coast,” while the US “would like to prevent” Russian submarines from having access to the Atlantic, she said.
Longyearbyen’s residents, who hail from about 50 countries, are staying cool-headed amid the speculation.
“Maybe we talk a bit more about what’s happening in Greenland and with Trump and everything, but at the same time I feel like we’re not more anxious than we usually are,” shop employee Charlotte Bakke-Mathiesen said. “We’re just in our own bubble.”
In his office, where his mayor’s chain is displayed alongside a polar bear femur, Terje Aunevik echoed that sentiment.
“The situation is as it is, but I don’t feel it as a threat,” he said. “I strongly believe that both our allies and our neighbors are living very well with Norway having sovereignty over this island.”
By “neighbors,” he means the 350 or so Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians who live in the Svalbard town of Barentsburg, about 40km away as the crow flies.
It is hard to believe that Barentsburg, a small mining community under Russian control for almost a century, is on NATO territory: A Lenin bust takes center stage in the town, where all of the signs are written in Cyrillic lettering.
A treaty signed in 1920 recognizes Norway’s “full and absolute” sovereignty over Svalbard, but it also gives citizens of the almost 50 signatory powers — which include China, Russia and the US — equal rights to exploit its resources.
Since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Norway has tried to tighten its control of Svalbard, for example by blocking the sale of land to foreigners and drastically reducing voting rights.
Moscow has said that Oslo is not respecting the Svalbard Treaty and has increased its provocations in the past few years.
It held a quasi-military parade in Barentsburg celebrating Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany and erected a giant unauthorized Orthodox cross in Pyramiden, another small Russian community.
“The Russians have other more strategic priorities right now and have no interest in an escalation beyond the hybrid actions they’ve been conducting for a long time,” polar geopolitics researcher Mikaa Blugeon-Mered said when asked about a possible Russian takeover attempt.
“For Norway, the United States is a much bigger concern today when it comes to Svalbard, because it is more likely to carry out an operation that could destabilize the territory’s precarious balance,” he said. “With the current Trump administration, anything can happen.”
For a long time, experts spoke of “arctic exceptionalism”: the concept that the region had its own set of unwritten rules of cooperation, a zone of peace immune to geopolitical rivalries.
Now, “the era of high north, low tension is over,” Kunz said.
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
STILL IN POWER: US intelligence reports showed that the Iranian regime is not in danger of collapse and retains control of the public, casting doubt on Trump’s exit Nearly every US Senate Democrat on Wednesday signed a letter sent to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth requesting a “swift investigation” of airstrikes on a girls’ school in Iran that killed scores of children and any other potential US military actions causing civilian harm. Reuters reported on Thursday last week that US military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for the Feb. 28 strike on the school, as US and Israeli forces launched attacks on Iran. “The results of this school attack are horrific. The majority of those killed in the strikes were girls between the ages
RSS