In the dark Arctic morning, the gunshots could almost be mistaken for ice cracking. But then a rocket blasts in the distance. And the gunfire comes again, closer this time. There’s the sudden whir of helicopter blades too – another squadron dropping in to join the ground attack. Their boots make almost no sound as they hit the snow.

It’s March 2022 and NATO is running one of the largest military drills in the Arctic since the Cold War. More than 30,000 troops from 27 countries are fighting off an imagined Russian invasion of Norway. And, given that just weeks earlier Russia really did invade Ukraine, launching the biggest war in Europe since WWII, this no longer feels so hypothetical. Just over the Norwegian border in the Kola Peninsula lies much of Russia’s nuclear arsenal: submarines and missile launchers bearing warheads, now on high alert by the order of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Some Indigenous nations tell stories of the northern lights as torches guiding warriors to victory. Today experts say the Arctic is increasingly becoming a theatre of conflict again. Ex-Pentagon official Jim Townsend recalls travelling north after the Cold War to dismantle many of the Allies’ military bases and air defence systems there. “Now we’re going back,” he says. “Things are heating up again.”

In more ways than one. The shockwaves from the war in Ukraine have been felt around the world, but particularly in the Arctic where climate change is wreaking its most dramatic changes yet – warping roads, unearthing ancient corpses and toppling whole mountains of ice. As the frozen wilderness melts, new access for shipping and resource extraction is opening too – along with new avenues of attack. Among states now looking to the high north is China, with serious ambitions to build a Polar Silk Road (and icebreaker fleet) of its own.

What’s up there at the top of the world? How are the major powers staking their claim? And what does it all have to do with nuclear weapons?

Why has the Ukraine war put the Arctic in the spotlight?

In September, the man handpicked by Putin to help head up Russian development in the Arctic, Ivan Pechorin, fell off a boat and drowned – the latest in a string of high-profile Russians to die in mysterious circumstances.

These misfortunes, already statistically higher among critics and oligarchs in Putin’s “mafia state”, have spiked since Russia invaded Ukraine – perhaps rumblings of a civil war playing out behind the scenes of Putin’s inner circle as support for the president and his costly war is tested, says Professor Katarzyna Zysk at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies and the Atlantic Council.

Many of the dead have been energy executives with business interests in the Arctic – a region said to hold more fossil fuel reserves than Saudi Arabia. (In fact, two of Putin’s point men in the far north have died suddenly this year – the first, Igor Nosov, seemingly of a stroke in February.)

“Russia is basically drowning in Ukraine ... and yet,  there hasn’t been a drop in military activity in the Arctic.”

Whether the deaths really are suspicious or not, the stakes are high for both Russia and NATO in the Arctic right now. For Russia, the region is not only rich in the resources it needs to prop up its wartime economy, it’s a place to flex its muscles with shows of force – testing experimental weapons, pinging NATO airspace and running military drills. Russia controls about half of the Arctic territory and sees the region as its “backyard”, one of its most important military footprints, says Zysk, who has been studying the Russian army for 15 years. “The Arctic is part of Russia’s identity. They show the ships [in Kremlin] propaganda, landing paratroopers on the Arctic snow.”

As Russia suffers heavy losses in Ukraine, its nuclear arsenal up north is becoming even more important to the Kremlin, say Townsend and Zysk. “Russia is basically drowning in Ukraine, all its resources and political attention are going there,” Zysk says. “And yet, there hasn’t been a drop in military activity in the Arctic [like] expected.” Although some of its polar forces have been redeployed to Ukraine, it is continuing to run military drills and move nuclear warheads up north.

While Putin has long accused NATO of creeping closer to Russia, it is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that has actually triggered further NATO expansion, unifying Europe against Russia as never before. Now, when the long-neutral Finland and Sweden join the alliance, all eight Arctic states (below) will be NATO members, save Russia itself. With more northern countries in the fold and Putin making nuclear threats, NATO has declared a new focus on the Arctic too. After all, “the shortest path to North America for Russian missiles or bombers [is] over the North Pole,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in August.

NATO forces are again hunting for Russian submarines in the freezing waters, and bases (and defence budgets) for both the West and Russia are being ramped up. The United States has just created an ambassador-at-large for the Arctic and nearby countries such as the UK are rushing to put out their own Arctic defence strategies.

“Climate change is, unfortunately, making the Arctic a place of greater military strategic value as it melts.”

Previously, the Arctic had been one of the few places where Russia came to the table with NATO members on science and other projects; there “Russia and the US are essentially next-door neighbours”, says military researcher Dr Elizabeth Buchanan at the Royal Australian Navy. But Putin’s war has put such co-operation on ice. The seven other Arctic states have turned their backs on the region’s governing Arctic Council, which is currently chaired by Russia, and many critical climate-science projects are in limbo.

“And you need that science to get policy,” says Troy Bouffard, director of the Alaska-based Centre for Arctic Security and Resilience and a former Council delegate. “It’s heartbreaking. You had NATO states working with Russia on things like emergency response, environmental protection, in ways that don’t happen anywhere else. Indigenous nations at the table too, with a voice, with power. We can continue the work. But what does it mean without Russia?”

Indeed, the old view that the remote Arctic could remain above war feels especially naive now, Zysk says.

Townsend spent 30 years working for the Pentagon focused on NATO (“I moved to the Europe NATO office just as the Berlin Wall was coming down”) and worries that the Arctic is returning to its Cold War days of high tension. “That started even before [Putin’s war in Ukraine],” he says. “Climate change is, unfortunately, making the Arctic a place of greater military strategic value as it melts. There’s sadness in that.”

Why is the Arctic so important strategically?

The Arctic, generally, refers to whatever falls within the Arctic Circle that marks the edge of the midnight sun and polar night phenomena, where day and night can last for months on end. It’s a region bigger than the US and home to almost 4 million people, including many Indigenous nations. Parts of the Arctic look like another planet – a frozen desert. Others are green and lush, lands of forest, wildflowers, thundering waterfalls, bogs and marshes. Along creek beds, you might stumble upon a mammoth tusk. In the frozen north, bodies buried centuries ago have been known to surface from the thawing snow, still preserved – and ancient microbes too. Polar bears will wander into some towns, hungrier now that the sea ice they need to hunt seals is vanishing.

But, among nations, Arctic territory is more clearly divided. Eight countries have claims: Russia, Canada, the US (via Alaska), Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark (which includes Greenland) and Iceland. While almost every nation claims the North Pole itself (“that’s largely symbolic,” says Bouffard), most of the Arctic’s untapped resources already fall within sovereign lines. We’re probably unlikely then to see soldiers fighting in the snow over territory. “You can’t just sneak into Russia’s Arctic and steal their oil.”

Instead, experts expect the Arctic will be a key flash point in any wider conflict between Russia and the West. In particular, its ocean – fast losing its ice – would become an important route for naval forces. The Arctic is already home to Russia’s Northern Fleet, “the strongest of its four fleets”, Zysk says, which would need to pass by Iceland to reach the open Atlantic Ocean. “Russia would use it to pressure the enemy from another direction,” she says.

The US has recently reopened its old base in Iceland to help shore up the pass (“I always tell Icelanders they’re the cork in the bottle between Russia and the North Atlantic,” says Townsend). There are now US marines stationed in Norway for the first time since WWII, and Denmark is installing radar at popular holiday spot the Faroe Islands as NATO beefs up forces across the high north.

“Spies for both sides watch closely too, including in Russia’s closed city of Severodvinsk, where it builds submarines.”

But the allies still have a lot of catching up to do, Zysk says. Russia has been rebuilding its Arctic footprint for more than a decade, reopening hundreds of old Soviet bases. (In fact, analysis by Reuters suggests it has now surpassed its Cold War heyday.)

And that hypothetical drill of Russians invading Norway? Not so far-fetched. On the frontline with Russia, Norway has long been calling for NATO’s eye to turn to the Arctic, says Townsend, concerned that any major war between Russia and the West would likely feature a first strike on northern Norway near Russia’s nuclear assets in the Kola.

Russia is known for jamming GPS signals and running military drills uneasily close to the border, although generally, Zysk says, “there’s been less provocative behaviour in the Norway Arctic than, say, the Black Sea” or near Finland and Sweden. A hotline runs between the Norwegian army and Russia’s Northern Fleet “to clear up any misunderstandings”. And spies for both sides watch closely too, including in Russia’s “closed” city of Severodvinsk, where it builds submarines.

“Unlike many Western countries, Norway never defunded Russia studies,” Zysk says. “They’ve been following the intelligence.” In 2017, a Norwegian spy was arrested in Russia (and released 23 months later) and the Norwegian government has this year announced millions more will be spent hunting Russian saboteurs near the Kola. “We are NATO’s ears and eyes in the north,” Norway’s US ambassador, Anniken Ramberg Krutnes, said in May.

Bouffard says that while “NATO has never cared much about the Arctic”, the arrival of Finland and Sweden into the alliance “is going to change their calculus”.

“The nature of European security has changed. We can no longer trust anything Russia says.”

How is melting ice changing things?

Meanwhile, the ice separating Russia from its old rival the US is itself shrinking. The Arctic is vital to keeping the planet cool but it is warming about four times faster than the rest of the world, on track to have ice-free summers at least once a decade if the Earth hits 2 degrees of warming. About half of its ice has been lost since satellites first took pictures, an area more than twice the size of Alaska. That means the bright polar cap is reflecting less light (and releasing more planet-warming carbon and methane gas from the thawing permafrost), in turn accelerating global warming in its own wicked feedback loop. All that melting ice has even caused the Earth’s axis to tilt and wobble a little. (The Greenland ice sheet alone could raise global sea levels by more than seven metres.)

As Zysk puts it, there’s another ocean opening up before our eyes. “So Russia needs more control, more surveillance … to protect what earlier was protected by ice.”

“Boom! The Arctic is super important. It was like the whole world started running a race in the dark.”

“It’s a very sensitive area, both during the Cold War and now,” Townsend adds. With the ice “breaking up”, Russia is becoming more paranoid about the security of its Northern Fleet. “And jumpy Russians are never a good thing.”

But there’s money to be made too. In 2007, a pair of mini-submarines plunged to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and planted a Russian flag on the North Pole’s seafloor. The move, symbolically claiming the Arctic’s vast oil and gas reserves for Russia, drew condemnation from the West even though it was really a bluff, Bouffard says – the Russians didn’t have the technology to mine the seafloor up north (no one did). “But that was the starter pistol,” he says. “Boom! The Arctic is super important. It was like the whole world started running a race in the dark. They didn’t really know why they were running. But the thing is, everyone started.”

What they’ve since discovered is that even a melting Arctic remains a dangerous place to develop. “This is a region of extremes,” says Zysk. “It’s still expensive and difficult to extract anything, so the price has to be high for it to make sense. The price of oil was high back then with the Iraq War.”

Today the market for fossil fuels is shrinking as the world shifts to green energy, a transition picking up even more speed, Bouffard notes, now so much of the world is refusing to buy Russian energy in retaliation for its Ukraine war.

But those very economic sanctions are what’s making Arctic energy even more important to the Kremlin now. Fossil fuels are Russia’s main source of income and to keep that money flowing, it needs to move from dwindling onshore reserves to those untapped in the Arctic, Zysk says.

The problem is that, while Russia has managed to keep selling energy to some nations such as China and India since the invasion, investors are deserting its Arctic projects in droves. Norway (which has also grown rich from fossil fuels) has stopped working with Russia to explore oil and gas fields in the Arctic, and energy giants BP, Shell and Exxon pulled their money in Russia within days of Putin’s invasion. Even Arctic projects backed by Chinese companies (big investors in Russia’s northern development) have stalled.

Of course, the ocean itself has value too. As the Arctic opens, routes once deemed too treacherous or icy to cross are shaping up as new shipping superhighways. Beyond countries’ maritime boundaries, the Arctic is considered international waters, where everyone is supposed to have freedom of navigation. But Russia has asserted control of a vast swathe of sea in a new shipping lane linking Europe and Asia it calls the Northern Sea Route. That will mean big money not only for Russia but for Kremlin ally China, in particular, as shipping times are slashed.

Other countries, including China, do not recognise Russian control of the route, and the West may yet escalate to freedom of navigation exercises “like you see in the South China Sea against China’s build-up”, Bouffard says, “because this could set a dangerous precedent.” But China plays the long game, he says, and such concerns are unlikely to be a dealbreaker in its dealings with Russia. “It’s probably happy to wait for the central routes [straight through] the Arctic to open up” as more ice melts.

The Northern Sea Route is still itself somewhat dicey, even as Russia builds up infrastructure along it, Townsend says, with high insurance costs. Now that less of the Arctic is frozen, some of the hardest ice, the kind that wrecks ships, is no longer penned in. “It’s turning up in places we’ve never seen before,” Bouffard says. “And that scares mariners.” After the Ukraine invasion, Russia’s Northern Sea Route is not expected to see any international transits at all this year, a first in almost 15 years. Even China’s main shipping company Cosco isn’t sailing.

Could war break out in the Arctic – and what about those nukes?

Soldiers say the Arctic is a “different beast”, where the cold can kill you as easily as enemy fire and GPS and communications often konk out. “The cold gets in your bones, it blows right through you,” US Marine Sergeant Cole Green said during the March NATO drill. (Four US marines died in a plane crash during that exercise in reportedly bad weather.)

It’s unlikely then, says Buchanan, that the Arctic would become a major battlefield. “I’d expect no shots to be fired,” she says. “It’s such a harsh operational environment you’d need to rescue the enemy before fighting them!” She sees conflict flaring instead in maritime chokepoints.

Zysk has helped war-game everything up north from catastrophic oil spills to invasions and agrees, “it’s hard to imagine an armed conflict just exploding in the Arctic over territory or resources” but adds it “cannot be excluded entirely either”. Not all the Arctic is frozen wilderness. “The Norwegian Arctic is much more developed, for example.” (Russia’s ambassador to Norway recently told Sky News he was “not confident” war in the Arctic could be avoided, though he denied Russia has been militarising it.)

“It’s no secret that the North American defence system in the high north cannot defeat those cruise missiles.”

It’s possible too, that Russia could wage a kind of hybrid war, Zysk says, with unmarked soldiers and sabotage, as it did when it seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. “A grey-zone operation where it’s unclear what’s happening and NATO will be challenged to react. Perhaps they won’t agree on what to do.” The Norwegian islands of Svalbard, for example, might be one such target. Though they are technically protected by NATO as Norwegian territory, the islands are subject to international claims too, under a treaty that allows signatories to mine there. The Soviets wanted to seize Svalbard after WWII, and Russia maintains a strong presence there today. “Its goal is to make sure [Svalbard] is not used by NATO” militarily, Zysk says. “But, for any kind of [hybrid attack], Russia would have to be fairly sure NATO would do nothing.”

Meanwhile, Canadian and US experts say both countries are struggling to modernise their Arctic defences. One problem, Bouffard says, is that the Arctic is just so big, it makes defence (and surveillance) tricky for all nations.

On the nuclear front, Russia has long used nukes to leapfrog gaps between its own army and that of the US, investing fossil fuel profits into new missile technologies. “And it’s no secret that the North American defence system in the high north cannot defeat those cruise missiles,” says Bouffard. “Our adversaries know our policy is not to allow that stuff to launch.”

Already one of the new hypersonic missiles Russia has been testing in the Arctic has been unleashed on the battlefield against Ukraine – such an excessive use of the weapon that Bouffard thinks it was intended as a broader reminder to the West of Russia’s high-tech arsenal.

“And the weaker Russian conventional forces become, the more likely they are to threaten nuclear weapons,” Townsend says.

Zysk agrees that the risk of miscalculation is going up as both the war in Ukraine and the new wave of military drills and manoeuvres in the Arctic by Russia and NATO play out. Still, although Putin is under increasing pressure at home to produce a victory, Zysk expects some rationality will win out in the Kremlin war room. Russia knows it cannot beat all of NATO, and threatening to break the nuclear taboo has so far failed to stop the Western flow of weapons into Ukraine – or curb fierce Ukrainian resistance.

Longer term, the US is shifting its eye from Russia to China – a common view being, Bouffard explains, that once the war is over, “and Russia has to basically go home and rebuild, it’s not going to be as big a threat as it was”, including in the Arctic. “China is a different story.”

How serious are China’s Arctic ambitions?

In 2019, a Pentagon assessment warned that deepening Chinese activity in the Arctic could one day pave the way for China’s own nuclear submarines running deterrence drills in the icy north. Though experts note that China does not have the nuclear capability of either the US or Russia, the superpower has been steadily ramping up its polar investment, including opening scientific facilities and becoming an observer member of the Arctic Council. In 2018, China raised eyebrows when it declared itself a “near-Arctic state”.

“It’s not the South China Sea, but the Arctic is still important to China,” Bouffard says. “They’ll try to find a way in. They’re currently on Plan C.”

Plan A – talking themselves up “through brute-force rhetoric as a near-Arctic state” – failed, he says. So has its attempt to buy influence, at least so far. While China has “been poking around everywhere – Greenland, the Nordics – investing the way they do in the Pacific and Africa”, it hasn’t worked in the Arctic “because the way they’re able to outmanoeuvre everyone [usually] is by bringing in their own workforce. You can’t do that in the Arctic. Our Indigenous people said no”. That’s stopped China reaching the critical threshold of foreign investment they need for large-scale influence.

Townsend agrees that we should treat Chinese Arctic ambitions seriously. “I think China wants to corner the market up there, on those Russian resources and the Northern Sea Route … They don’t want to alienate the West either by becoming too buddy-buddy with the Russians, but they want to make sure that they can take advantage of Russia’s dire situation right now.”

“We don’t know where all those [oligarchs’] loyalties lie and maybe China will find a way to leverage them.”

Buchanan notes that Russia is lobbying hard for other investment partners in its Arctic development, from India to the United Arab Emirates, to limit China’s stranglehold and “debt trap diplomacy”.

Indeed, Bouffard says China is no longer cosying up to Russia so much as bullying it. “They’re in charge. They’re gonna help them out but on their terms, with bad deals [for Russia].” And it may be that China finds other ways into the north, through oligarchs rather than the Russian state directly, if the Kremlin strays. “We don’t know where all those [oligarchs’] loyalties lie and maybe China will find a way to leverage them.”

Townsend and Bouffard say the Arctic will now be a key test of the Russia-China partnership. And “it’ll expose a lot of Russia’s intent and colours” just as it will China’s, Bouffard says.

But for all the geopolitical upheaval up north, the most dramatic changes are still in the landscape itself. Bouffard has lived in the Alaskan Arctic for 20-odd years and “I’m seeing changes I should have never seen this fast,” he says, from wilder lightning storms and roads warped by thawing permafrost, to raging fires and crumbling coastlines. Overhead, the jetstream that holds the cold weather at the top of the world is at times dipping too low – down into the US. “All of a sudden it’ll be warmer in Alaska than the middle of the US. You have snow in Texas, freezing minus 40 degree [nights] in Chicago. It’s killing people.”

For Indigenous nations, watching the ice crack and break apart, watching cultural sites destroyed, there’s a particularly acute heartbreak.

But, if the Arctic is, as scientists say, “the canary in the coal mine, the bellwether” for how the Earth is coping with the sharp changes of global warming, then we’re all in trouble.

With additional reporting by Felicity Lewis