LONGYEARBYEN: 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 United States or Russia.
“Today Greenland, tomorrow Svalbard?” – Terje Aunevik, mayor of Svalbard’s main town Longyearbyen, says he has been asked the question many times.
US President Donald Trump’s expansionist ambitions have turned the global spotlight on the Arctic, where geo-strategic and financial stakes are mounting.
“The Arctic is no longer a quiet corner on the map,” the European Union’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas told a conference in Tromso in northern Norway in early February. “It is the front line of the global power competition.”
Longyearbyen is an unusual place. A former mining community turned tourist destination and academic hotspot, it lies in the fastest-warming region on the planet.
One of the northernmost towns in the world, Longyearbyen is home to 2,500 people.
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.
Strategic importance
Some political observers have suggested that Trump’s desire to control the Arctic may extend beyond Greenland to Svalbard, or that Russia may 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 Russia’s 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,” Barbara Kunz, director of the European Security Programme at Stockholm peace research institute SIPRI, told AFP.
“Russia wants to protect its nuclear deterrence, and so it wants to make sure that nobody can approach its northern coast”, while the United States “would like to prevent” Russian submarines from having access to the Atlantic, she said.
