Far from being peripheral to world order, the Arctic has in the last decade transformed into a region of notable strategic importance for Russia’s great power ambitions. While flexing its muscles through the expansion of military capabilities—including the re-opening of 50 previously closed Soviet-era military posts (Conley et al., 2020)—Russia has also remained committed to principles guiding international peace and cooperation in the Arctic. To explain this dual approach in Russia’s Arctic behaviour, this essay will demonstrate the importance of adopting a constructivist lens to understanding state behaviour in the High North. It transcends realist lenses, as well as the traditionally applied idea of Arctic exceptionalism, to delve into how strategic cultural elements inform Russia’s Arctic policy. It argues that while realist perspectives and the focus on Russia’s economic interests shed light on the balance between military expansion and cooperative engagements, the frameworks overlook how Russia’s unique strategic culture—marked by a sense of great power status and inherent vulnerability—underpins strategic decisions in an uncertain regional setting.

This essay proceeds in three parts, starting with an examination of the mainstream literature on Arctic security policy before engaging with how the concept of strategic culture can pivot analysis of Russia’s behaviour in the region. By exploring culturally sensitive elements of Russian strategic thinking in the final section, the essay argues that Russia’s dual approach to Arctic policy cannot be fully understood without reference to its deep-rooted ideational factors.

Between Conflict and Cooperation

Mainstream literature on Russian Arctic policy has long been trapped in a binary framing of geopolitical conditions. The region has either been portrayed as one of strong cooperation isolated from wider international security realities (Black, 2015; Staun, 2017) or a resource-rich area that Russia is attempting to conquer and dominate (Käpylä & Mikkola, 2015; Clark & White, 2022). Much of this latter commentary arose following Russia’s ceremonial planting of a corrosion-resistant titanium flag on the Arctic seabed as part of an international scientific expedition in 2007, which caused Western suspicion “about what lengths Russia may go to secure its Arctic sovereignty” (Roberts, 2015, p. 114).

This alarmist Western discourse saw the second iteration of the Russian Arctic Strategy in 2013 emphasise the importance of enhancing the combat and mobilisation readiness of the armed forces to “ensure the sovereign rights of Russia’s Arctic Zone” (Klimenko, 2016, p. 19). From an offensive structural realist perspective—relying on key assumptions that the international system is anarchic and that states can never with certainty know the intentions of others—Russia’s expansive moves in the Arctic can be considered through the prism of self-help, where “the pursuit of power stops only when hegemony is achieved” (Mearsheimer, 2001, p. 34). Reflecting the view that states seek to surpass conditions of simple survival by defensively preserving power (Waltz, 1979), Russian moves in the Arctic—including its resumption of long-range air and naval combat patrols in the region (Konyshev & Sergunin, 2014)—can be seen as means through which to signal hegemonic operational capacity. This includes significant emphasis on military modernisation, as seen in the 2017 widely featured unveiling of the military Arctic Trefoil base, forming part of Russia’s new Arctic Joint Strategic Command (Foxall, 2017).

Having said that, many scholars—not least Trenin and Baev (2010, p. 25)—consider this hard-line geopolitical discourse “increasingly shorn of any connection to the real situation in the region”. This strand of literature points to the cooperative spirit Russia has demonstrated in the Arctic, as evident in its engagement in US bilateral research programmes, the 2011 establishment of collaborative search and rescue operations (SAR), and multilateral environmental protection efforts (Sergunin & Konyshev, 2014). In terms of security strategy, Russia’s signing of the Murmansk Agreement with Norway in 2010—which saw the settling of a 40-years long border dispute through agreement of a delimitation line in the Barents Sea—is often considered emblematic of Russian intentions not being as belligerent as some realists maintain (Staun, 2017).

To explain this, certain observers highlight the idea of an Arctic exceptionalism, of which the most conventional applications since the 1990s “have sought and served to isolate the Arctic as a political region apart from, rather than a part of, international relations writ large” (Lackenbauer & Dean, 2020, p. 343). According to this, cooperative efforts in the Arctic—such as the multilateral Arctic Council (Graczyk & Rottem, 2020)—have survived wider international tensions, most notably Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, because the region is characterised by a state of environmental emergency and geological change (Dittmer et al., 2011) that results in Russia focusing on “the primacy of Arctic coastal states in developing and safeguarding the region” (Wilson Rowe & Blakkisrud, 2014, p. 82).

Wilson Rowe and Blakkisrud (2014, p. 83) nevertheless acknowledge that this diplomatic framing of the region plays into “overdrawn caricatures of the Arctic as either a zone of intense geopolitical competition over resources or a region of exclusively seamless international cooperation”. While sceptics have suggested that Russia’s collaborative approach is mere camouflage for military build-up as “part of a master plan to thwart American objectives or balance American power” (Roberts, 2015, p. 115), more nuanced scholars maintain that there are more complex dynamics at play. This analysis tends to focus on the specific strategic utility underpinning Russia’s combination of international cooperation and build-up of military capabilities, suggesting—for example—that it is “increasingly governed by national economic interests” (Åland, 2010, p. 269). As its Arctic policies highlight, Russia places significant emphasis on utilising the territory as a resource base for continued national economic growth (Klimenko, 2020).

Russia’s Arctic actions are by many therefore considered as being driven by pragmatic interests, “in contrast with the Cold War era when the Soviet behavior was driven by ideological or geopolitical factors” (Konyshev and Sergunin, 2014, p. 323). A key trope of this pragmatism is the often-cited Northern Sea Route (NSR), which Russia is promoting as a new “major international transportation artery” (Lackenbauer et al., 2022, p. 164) and through which it is aiming to increase traffic from 30 million tons in 2020 to 80 million tons by 2024 (Klimenko, 2020). While this project explains why Russia has choosen to engage in a marriage of convenience with China throughout the 2010s—presenting it with an opportunity to integrate a ‘Polar Silk Road’ design in NSR to open up investments and attractive trade deals for Russia (Ziegler, 2021; Staun & Sørensen, 2023)—it does not necessarily explain Russia’s two-track policy in relation to the West. Though it could be argued that Russia is strengthening the commercial appeal of NSR by promoting geopolitical certainty in the region while securing the route through military posturing (Lackenbauer et al., 2022), such explanations are reductive of wider political influences at play.

Strategic Culture

While preceding literature provides a useful preliminary lens through which to explore Russia’s Arctic activities, the focus on binary framings and economic incentives fails to address how cultural factors inform Russia’s two-pronged activities. Instead of employing a spectrum of realist and liberalist foreign policy discourse to examine its actions (Staun, 2017), it is important to explore the cultural forces behind its policies. By employing a constructivist lens of strategic culture, analysis can open up for how “a nation’s traditions, values, attitudes, patterns of behaviour, symbols, achievements and particular ways of adapting to the environment” influences problem-solving “with respect to the threat or use of force” (Booth, 1990, p. 121). Despite being a contested conceptual tool—most starkly demonstrated by the debate regarding........

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