Russian Interests in the Arctic: The Northern Sea Route – YouTube
On 31 March, Mariia presented her recent research on the Northern Sea Route (NSR) legal regime as an exemplary instance of Russia’s use of lawfare as a tool of coercive signalling in the Arctic.
In conversation and Q&A with Dr. Emily J. Holland, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Mariia argued that the current legal regime enacted in 2023 along with Russia’s 2022 Maritime Doctrine — which explicitly prioritises enforcing control over foreign naval activity along the NSR — was an early and underappreciated indicator of a broader shift in Russia’s naval deterrence posture.
That shift, she argued, is best understood not as a reaction to any single development, but as part of a long-horizon, holistic state-society effort — characteristic of how Russia approaches grand strategy more broadly. The Arctic simultaneously serves as Russia’s pre-eminent military-strategic rear, its principal energy resource and export base, and a symbol of national power and prestige. That fusion is intentional, and the NSR sits at its centre. This logic is now made explicit by Russia’s newly announced Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor (TATC). While officially framed in economic terms — connecting industrial, agricultural, and energy hubs to global consumer markets via a shorter and sanctions-resistant route — the project reveals a deeper military-strategic rationale.
Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO has worsened the strategic outlook for protecting ballistic missile submarine operations from the Kola Peninsula, accelerating the dispersion of forces across the Arctic marginal seas and elevating the Pacific Fleet’s role in strategic deterrence. The NSR legal regime is an integral part of this architecture: by asserting that key straits constitute internal waterways — in defiance of UNCLOS — and by creating regulatory tripwires around unauthorised transit, Russia converts legal ambiguity into strategic ambiguity. Some Russian legal scholars have gone further, arguing that unauthorised transit could constitute an act of aggression, or that Russia could lawfully close the Kara Sea to foreign navigation in retaliation for Western sanctions.
Within the TATC, the NSR serves as the critical connector — binding Siberia’s major river systems and rail networks into a unified infrastructure that is as much military as it is commercial. The announced modernisation of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, taken alongside the recent deployment of modern missile corvettes on Lake Ladoga, points to the on-going integration of the Baltic and the Arctic into a single operational space, with brown-water non-strategic deterrent capabilities build-up potentially underway. The corridor, in other words, is not only an answer to Western sanctions — it equally outlines the countours of an ambitious circumpolar deterrence posture. Russia’s strategy in the Arctic is undergoing a fundamental shift, which can be described as evolving away from the Kola-centred bastion model and toward reaslisation of a Eurasian grand strategy vision.
For NATO, Mariia concluded, understanding Russia’s deterrence comprehensively is an imperative of credible response. Along with military-strategic developments, it is important to keep a big picture in mind – whereas legal frameworks have become an instrument of escalation control in as much as military signalling.
