PM, Putin should meet at Pole: Russian explorer
MOSCOW Russia’s most celebrated polar explorer, Artur Chilingarov, wants Russian President Vladimir Putin and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to meet at the North Pole.
“I have mentioned this to President Putin, and I will mention it again,” the limber, heavily bearded Hero of Russia and Hero of the Soviet Union said during an interview conducted this week in an office crammed with memorabilia from his many expeditions to the two Poles.
“Let’s do it. It would be a symbol of Russian-Canadian friendship in the North.”
Canadians may remember Chilingarov as the explorer who, in 2007, planted a titanium replica of the Russian flag at the bottom of the ocean — at the top of the world. It was a dramatic act that caused shock and anger in Ottawa and other northern capitals.
Canadian officials such as then- foreign minister Peter MacKay had taken deep offence at his dramatic underwater showmanship in one of two small Mir deepsea minisubmarines,
“This isn’t the 15th century,” MacKay told CTV at the time. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.’”
Told that some Canadians still vilified him, Chilingarov, who is a member of the Russian Federation Council, responded with a profound belly laugh.
“I don’t know why Canadians took this so painfully,” he said. “The North Pole is a fixed place, and it is for everyone.”
Chilingarov, Putin’s special envoy for international cooperation in the Arctic and Antarctic, professed to be by turns mystified and amused by the fury overseas to a mission which received intense, hugely positive media coverage in Russia.
“To be sure, I am a Russian patriot and a celebrated person here, but I was the head of the Canada-USSR Friendship Society in Soviet times, and I have lots of friends in Canada,” the 72-year-old oceanographer said.
Other Canadians he counted as friends, he said, included Titanic film director James Cameron. They shared an enthusiasm for deepsea exploration in mini-subs such as the two vessels that took Chilingarov and five other Russians to the sea bed at the North Pole.
Back in 2007, the BBC quoted Chilingarov as saying, “The Arctic is Russian. We must prove the North Pole is an extension of the Russian land mass.”
As to which country owned the great northern ocean, he took a less belligerent position on the issue, as has Putin since 2010.
“There are some forces here would consider that it is all ours,” he said. “But I think that it is up to the ( United Nations) to make decisions about who owns the Arctic shelves” based on scientific evidence about how continental shelves were connected to land masses.
Despite some foreigners and Russians having derided his what he did five years ago as a publicity caper, Chilingarov said others “thanked me because our expedition to the North Pole had been an impetus for international research in the Arctic.”
With a twinkle in his eye, Chilingarov said that, instead of criticizing him, Canada should “give me an award” for the attention he had brought to Arctic research and because of his long-standing efforts to improve ties between Canada and Russia.
“I, like all Russians, have always had a great respect for Canada and the quality of its Arctic research,” he said. “We have so much to learn from you, especially about how to treat native populations well. But I guess Canadians don’t know my biography.”
Posing for a photo in front of a large map of the top of the world in his office, Chilingarov held a miniature copy of the Russian tricolour that now rests forever on the sea bed at the North Pole.
“What is not widely known is how difficult it was to do this,” he said. “We went down nearly 4.5 kilometres to the sea bed. The trickiest part was the return to the surface. The ice had shifted, and we had to find a hole in it. It required nine hours and am icebreaker to finally break through.”
The drama at the North Pole, which held Russians spellbound for days, had involved scientific research of a geophysical character, he said.
“Because it was such an achievement and because I am a Russian, of course I brought our flag with me,” he said, adding “when the Americans landed on the moon they put a U.S. flag there.”
The international focus on Russia’s ambitions in the Arctic was somewhat puzzling he said.
“The most active country in the Arctic right now is China,” he said, raising an eyebrow mischievously, adding that as well as building a fleet of icebreakers and ice-strengthened cargo ships, the Chinese were learning how to drill far deeper in the ocean than any other country.