Canada-russia ties warm in Arctic
Rescue helps to smooth waters
Thursday, October 4, 2012
The Windsor Star •
windsorstar.com ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA About 20 Russian scientists on a floating research station that drifted to less than 100 kilometres from islands in Canada’s Arctic archipelago were retrieved last month by a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker, according to Russians familiar with the mission.
“NP 39 (the station) spent more than three months in the Canadian (sovereign economic) zone,” before the scientists were taken off the platform, Alexander Danilov, deputy director of Russia’s Institute of Arctic and Antarctic Research, said about Russian projects in the High Arctic, where there are overlapping territorial claims by Russia, Canada, Denmark (for Greenland) and the United States.
“We studied your economic zone with your permission,” Danilov said. “We invited your scientists out” to visit the platform, which is officially known as North Pole 39, “but perhaps they could not find an interest … ” No Canadian scientists visited the station.
“We talked to your scientists. They were interested in our experiments. We explained to them our evacuation plans. All information was passed to Canada through our ministry of foreign affairs.”
The offices of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Minister John Baird did not respond to a request for comment on the long, unintentional journey of the Russian research platform far into Canada’s economic zone, or the Russian icebreaker that followed it to retrieve the scientists.
Such transits as the Russian ice station and icebreaker inside a country’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone are allowed by the UN Law of the Seas Convention on the principle of “freedom of navigation and overflight.” But the convention also states that coastal states “have sovereign rights … with respect to natural resources and certain economic activities and exercise jurisdiction over marine science research and environmental protection” within their economic zones.
To trace the 2,500-km journey of the icebreaker Rossiya to NP 39, Danilov provided Postmedia with a digital map. It showed the icebreaker reached the research platform to the north of Ellesmere Island on Sept. 15. The large island is home to a secret Royal Canadian Air Force communications base at Alert, a weather station at Eureka and a small Inuit settlement at Grise Fjord.
The Russian map showed that almost the entire polar ice pack migrated this summer to the Canadian and Greenlandic side of the Arctic Ocean. Conversely, almost the entire Russian side of the Arctic Ocean was ice-free this summer.
It took the Rossiya a week to cross the Arctic Ocean from the northern port of Murmansk to pick up the scientists and their scientific gear and abandon their research station, which had been built on pack ice. To complete the mission, the massive Artika-class icebreaker spent three days in Arctic waters that are part of Canada’s 200-mile sovereign economic zone.
How the evacuation of NP 39 was dealt with, without any fuss, demonstrated how good relations were between Russia and Canada in the north, said Danilov.
“There is no confrontation in the Arctic, there is co-operation,” Danilov, who is a physical oceanographer by trade, stressed. “There are elements of competition but everything can be resolved within existing conventions. Some, especially journalists, try to make it look like a conflict, but it isn’t.”
This was a theme heard again and again during interviews conducted over two weeks with Russia’s top experts on the Arctic. It echoed what Russian President Vladimir Putin said in 2010 and has since repeated, about the north being a territory of dialogue and that there was “no battle for the Arctic.”
“Western countries still perceive Russian policy as aggressive,” in the Arctic, Ekaterina Klimenko wrote recently for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.”
Since then, Klimenko believes that Russia has come to realize that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea convention strengthened its legal position. As result, she said, Russia has not been nearly so bellicose lately about what territory it is entitled to in the Arctic.