Arctic Council Meeting Starts Amid Russia Tensions

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/25/us/politics/arctic-council-meeting-russia.html

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IQALUIT, Nunavut — Dmitri O. Rogozin, a Russian deputy prime minister who is blacklisted from traveling to most of Europe, provoked a diplomatic scuffle last weekend when he passed through Norway on his way to the North Pole.

Mr. Rogozin, leading a delegation that included priests bearing holy water and a banner of Jesus Christ, was at the top of the world to open a scientific research station on a shrinking ice cap and to proclaim, rather showily, Russia’s interest in the region.

“The Arctic,” he boasted on Twitter, “is a Russian Mecca.”

Mr. Rogozin’s excursion came only days before ministers gathered here on Baffin Island in Canada’s far north on Friday for a biennial summit meeting of the Arctic Council, an international organization created to foster cooperation in the region. It underscored how the deterioration of relations between the West and Russia over Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has strained the council’s mission as a changing climate has intensified economic and political competition in the Arctic.

Russia’s involvement in Ukraine — including, American officials said this week, a new buildup of forces in or near the border — has resulted in sanctions and travel bans on dozens of officials, like Mr. Rogozin, and a prohibition on the sale of American technology and services to help Russia tap its potentially enormous energy resources in the Arctic.

President Vladimir V. Putin views those as hostile acts and has responded by stepping up air patrols along Russia’s borders with NATO nations, including those that are members of the Arctic Council. He has also begun to build up troops and bases in response to increased commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route and a 2013 protest by Greenpeace International against Russia’s first oil platform in the waters off its northern coast.

“There is a pushing of the envelope here,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who attended the meeting here on Friday as part of an American delegation led by Secretary of State John Kerry.

“The Arctic should be this zone of peace,” Ms. Murkowski said during a recent speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, alluding to the council’s founding purpose. “I absolutely believe that, adhere to it, but I also recognize that within a zone of peace, there is respect that you show for one another.”

The Arctic Council — made up of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States, as well as observer nations and organizations — was created in 1996 as a diplomatic forum to address issues that arose from the increased activity in the region.

The council was never intended to be a forum for debating military and security matters, and until recently, it appeared to be immune to broader political differences.

At the council’s meeting in Nuuk, Greenland, in 2011, the members adopted their first legally binding agreement to coordinate search-and-rescue operations over 13 million square miles of ocean. In 2013, in Kiruna, Sweden, the council signed a similar agreement to coordinate cleanup efforts in the event of an oil spill, something that is no longer a hypothetical possibility given Russia’s first shipment of oil from its offshore platform in the Kara Sea last April.

At this year’s meeting, the nations agreed to discuss how to reduce the amount of methane and black carbon emitted by burning wood or fuels in the Arctic, considered a pernicious contributor to climate change. They offered no concrete proposals but pledged to do so by the time the council meets again in 2017.

Russia’s military activity in the Arctic and its vast territorial claim to waters there highlight the strategic priority that Mr. Putin has given to the region. The intensifying competition over natural resources has increased the possibility of confrontation, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 deeply strained relations with the rest of the council’s permanent members.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, who attended the last council meeting in Sweden two years ago, declined to attend this time. He cited a scheduling conflict, but many suspected that his decision was in retaliation for Canada’s sharp criticism of the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine and a boycott of a meeting on Arctic issues in Russia.

Instead, Russia sent its minister of natural resources and the environment, Sergei Y. Donskoi, who was also on Mr. Rogozin’s trip to the North Pole last weekend.

Leona Aglukkaq, Canada’s environmental minister and the chairwoman of the Arctic Council for the past two years, reiterated her country’s condemnation of the intervention in Ukraine during a private meeting with Mr. Donskoi. She and Canada’s foreign minister, Robert Nicholson, did so again when asked about it at a closing news conference, which was dominated by questions about Russia’s moves in the Arctic and beyond.

At Friday’s meeting, Mr. Donskoi declared that Russia opposed any politicization of the Arctic. “There is no room here for confrontation or for fear mongering, particularly from forces outside,” he said.

Other officials also emphasized that broader political disputes should not disrupt the council’s work to address the effects of climate change. “It’s in no one’s interest to let problems elsewhere impact cooperation in the Arctic,” said Finland’s foreign minister, Erkki Tuomioja.

The spat over the Russian excursion to the North Pole centered on the delegation’s layover in the Svalbard archipelago, Norwegian territory about 500 miles north of the mainland that, under a 1920 treaty, grants commercial and residential rights to other countries, including Russia.

Norway had joined the European Union and the United States in barring Mr. Rogozin from traveling through its territory after the annexation in Crimea, and it protested what was widely seen as a defiant gesture. Russia’s Foreign Ministry rebuffed Norway’s official complaint, saying that Mr. Rogozin had every right to travel through the territory.

“It would have been reasonable to expect the Norwegian side to react with understanding in the spirit of Arctic partnership,” the ministry said in a statement, “which Norway has, until now, always displayed.”

With the conclusion of the meeting here, the United States took over the chairmanship of the council from Canada, allowing it to set the organization’s agenda for the next two years until the next summit meeting, to be held in Alaska.

In his remarks on Friday, Mr. Kerry outlined what he called an ambitious set of goals, focused on ocean safety and security, economic development and, in particular, several steps to address climate change as part of President Obama’s push for stronger international action.

“The Arctic Council can do more on climate change,” Mr. Kerry said. He noted, for example, that the members and observers of the council contributed 60 percent of the world’s black carbon emissions. “So if we want to know where the problem begins,” he said, “all we have to do is look in the mirror.”