Scandinavia Is Preparing for War

On January 9, 2024, Swedish defense chief Gen. Micael Byden stood on a stage in Salen, Sweden, and gave a presentation intended to shock. Projecting a series of grisly images from the front lines of the Ukraine War, overlaid on a backdrop of snowy Swedish field, he asked: “Do you think this could be Sweden?”

Until February 2022, these questions would be unimaginable for a country that has maintained a careful 75-year strategy of peaceful nonalignment toward NATO. In a 2012 speech, the supreme commander of Sweden’s military at the time, Sverker Goranson, said that, in the event of an attack, “Sweden can survive for a week.” But at this recent Society and Defense Conference in Salen, leaders made it clear that the era of de-emphasizing defense was over. There, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson urged his citizens to prepare to defend themselves “with weapons in hand and our lives on the line.”

For Russia’s Scandinavian neighbors, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine disrupted a cool calculus of neutrality. Last year, Finland became NATO’s newest member, with Sweden likely soon to follow, pending approval from Hungary. These new northern alliances are shifting the geopolitical power balance, with Arctic NATO nations soon outnumbering Russia seven to one. And, just as the melting Arctic ice opens new resources and routes for global economic competition, it also exposes new defensive vulnerabilities.

Today, as Ukraine and its NATO allies push Russia into a corner, global leaders—together with Scandinavians themselves—are increasingly turning a troubled gaze north. They’re asking: How likely is escalation in colder climes?

“The increasing competition and militarization in the Arctic region … is worrying,” NATO military committee chair Adm. Rob Bauer said in an October 2023 speech at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland. “We must be prepared for military conflicts arising in the Arctic.”

“Low tensions in the High North”: so have global leaders and analysts referred to a post-Cold War period of relative polar stability. For the past several decades, bilateral and international agreements between Russia and other Arctic states have emphasized shared northern security as well as scientific and safety interests. But after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, these arrangements quickly fell apart. In March 2022, the Arctic Council, a forum between the eight Arctic states, suspended talks. (In May 2023, it cautiously resumed but has yet to make Russia’s involvement clear.) In September 2023, Russia left the smaller Barents Euro-Arctic Council with Norway, Finland, and Sweden—saying the Scandinavian states had “paralyzed” cooperation. In February 2023, Russia amended its Arctic policy, emphasizing new alliances with other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) nations, particularly China. That month, it also suspended participation in New START, the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia.

“There’s this post-Cold War political idea of ‘Arctic exceptionalism,’ that the north is excepted from developments in global politics,” said Rasmus Bertelsen, the Barents chair in politics at the Arctic University in Tromso. “The problem is, it’s never been valid.”

Look a little closer at the past decades, Bertelsen said, and you’ll see a Russian Arctic strategy that closely follows its global agenda. In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference firmly rejected a U.S.-led, post-Cold War global order of stability. That same year, Russia launched its first cyberattack on Estonia and made a bold Arctic territorial claim by planting a Russian flag in the seabed below the North Pole. Putin has also concentrated militarization around the High North. Since 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea, Russia has steadily grown a northern fleet of nuclear submarines, surface ships, missile facilities, air fleets, and radar stations. Today, Russia’s largest military base is on the Kola Peninsula, which borders Norway and Finland, where it is also testing new hypersonic missiles and a nuclear torpedo drone. Though about 80 percent of Russia’s northern land forces were deployed to Ukraine, its air and sea forces remain intact.

“Earlier, Russia had an interest in seeming like a constructive partner, including in the Arctic,” said Andreas Osthagen, a senior fellow at the Arctic Institute in Oslo, Norway. “Just like in the rest of the world, that has deteriorated.”

Russia’s full-scale invasion came as a wake-up call to Scandinavian neighbors that have, for decades, resisted militaristic alliances. Suddenly, neutrality began to look a lot more like vulnerability. Finland had an especially stunning reversal: As recently as December 2021, 51 percent of Finns opposed joining NATO. Today, 78 percent support the membership. With this alliance comes the promise of U.S. military might. In 2023, Finland and Sweden both signed bilateral military agreements with the United States, permitting American personnel and weapons at dozens of bases, including nine in the Arctic. Norway, an active NATO member since its formation, already has several bases that permit U.S. personnel and weapons. Still, since the Cold War, Norway has followed a “reassurance” policy that limits NATO and its allies’ presence past the 28th longitudinal zone, close to Russia. Now, it’s unclear whether that policy will hold.

Since 2009, the Nordic Defense Cooperation has aligned Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland on national military policy. In 2022, Norway, Finland and Sweden announced an agreement to strengthen the alliance with a focus on the high North. Today, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland are in ongoing talks about formally sharing their air forces. In March 2024, Norway will lead an expanded “Nordic response” exercise for these nations to test their coordinated defense plans. Michael Paul, a senior fellow in security policy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said that history will reveal this new Nordic alliance as “one of Putin’s greatest mistakes.”

“If the war in Ukraine has achieved anything, it’s to align the Nordics on security,” Paul said. “You want to divide your enemies, not unite them against you.”

Ferguson sees the U.S. Swedish and Finnish military bases as mutually beneficial: Where the U.S. has resources, it often lacks technical expertise in extreme conditions. These smaller nations, she said, have a lot to teach the United States military. And their alliance with NATO is, she said, a “game-changer.”

“We now have seven out of eight Arctic nations geopolitically aligned with highly capable militaries,” Ferguson said. “I don’t know if there is such a concentration of alignment and capabilities between nations anywhere else in the world.”

Still, Ferguson emphasized that this is all in the name of deterrence. And experts agree that a full-scale northern conflict is unlikely. Paradoxically, Paul noted, Russia’s sheer military capacity and economic resources that increase Arctic tensions also deter real escalation. In the north, Russia simply has too much to lose: The immense territorial mass and extensive fossil fuel resources both stand as major claims to its identity as a global superpower. And unlike the cases of Ukraine and Crimea, Putin has never publicly imagined reclaiming Finland, which declared independence from Russia in 1917, nor has he spoken about accessing the Atlantic through Norway. Paul said that the Kremlin has an interest in maintaining a “low level of tension” in the north.

For now, that has meant hybrid warfare: “gray zone” tactics that are harder to trace or attribute. For instance, in November 2023, after a massive surge of asylum-seekers prompted Finland to become the first neighbor to close its border to Russia, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo called the move “instrumentalized immigration”; that is, retaliation for joining NATO. (Russia denied the charge.)

At sea, potential aggression is even harder to trace. In April 2021 and January 2022, fiber-optic cables connecting the Svalbard archipelago to the Norwegian mainland was mysteriously severed. Later, vessel-tracking data revealed, in both instances, that Russian fishing boats had passed repeatedly over the cables prior to the damage. In October 2023, a Chinese container ship called the Newnew Polar Bear damaged a Baltic gas pipeline before entering Russian waters. According to the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, a severed anchor likely belonging to the ship caused the damage, but experts still dispute whether the damage was intentional. Proving malicious intent is extremely difficult, and investigations are ongoing.

“It’s one of the major questions being asked right now: How do we defend against attacks on subsea critical infrastructure?” said Marisol Maddox, a senior Arctic analyst at the Polar Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. “There hasn’t been a single instance of serious consequences. At this point, the lesson that Russia is learning is that they can get away with it.”

Intentional or not, the effects of such infrastructure damage can be extensive and long-lasting: For example, the fiber-optic cable damaged in April 2021 wasn’t identified and repaired until November of that year. Luckily, one other subsea cable remained to keep the lights on in Svalbard. But absent that redundancy, thousands of people could have been left stranded without power for months. In the event of an explicit conflict, Maddox said, those kinds of vulnerabilities are extremely worrying.

In highly militarized zones, mistakes may carry the highest risk. To Osthagen, “miscalculation and misinterpretation” are the “greatest security risk in the North Atlantic Arctic.” In this region, Russia and NATO both conduct frequent military exercises, rehearsing mobilization of their forces and fleets. These routine rehearsals are especially necessary in colder climates, which require cold-resilient equipment and technology. (Notably, Osthagen emphasized, Russia has simulated direct attacks on its neighbors, whereas NATO has strictly simulated defensive strategies.) But these are complicated operations, often testing people and procedures for the first time. All it takes is one accidentally discharged firearm, one crossed signal, for rehearsal to open a military theater. Typically, such exercises are clearly communicated and coordinated across borders. But more recently, this communication has suffered.

“Paradoxically, after February 2022, the tension and fear of something happening has increased, whereas the potential for dialogue has disappeared,” Osthagen said. “This is the most troubling aspect of all.”

And where does this warfare, hybrid or explicit, end? In the worst case, the current war in Ukraine could conclude with a northern strike. Russia has 11 submarines capable of launching long-range nuclear weapons; eight of them reside in the Kola Peninsula. For this reason alone, the Arctic carries a particular weight for global leaders who must consider escalation to its absolute hypothetical end.

Even so, Paul emphasized that Arctic conflict of any form still remains counter to Russia’s interests and is less likely than in other parts of the world. Still, he cautioned against assuming that Putin will behave rationally. If backed into a corner, as NATO expands and Ukrainian troops advance, it is impossible to know how he will respond. But a fact remains that Arctic nations won’t easily forget: The remainder of his military might centers on the north.

“Putin made a big mistake in Ukraine,” Paul said. “He could make another in the Arctic.”