America’s Military Trails Russia and China in Race for the Melting Arctic

DUTCH HARBOR, Alaska—On patrol in the Bering Sea last fall, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Kimball spotted seven Chinese and Russian vessels steaming through the frigid waters in a double line near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

The Kimball’s crew identified the main Chinese ship as the Nanchang, one of a new class of cruiser-destroyers that can launch more than 100 guided missiles. The Russian and Chinese ships, which were on a joint exercise, sailed north and east into U.S. waters, sending an unmistakable message about the region’s strategic value to Moscow and Beijing, according to U.S. military officials and national security experts.

Russian warships and Chinese research vessels aren’t uncommon in a region that includes the Aleutians, a strategic chain of volcanic islands that divides the Pacific Ocean from the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean. They were the location of bitter fighting during World War II. One small island city, Unalaska, which brings in more fish than any other U.S. port, hosts the Coast Guard base at Dutch Harbor. 

“But to see these combatants form up in a surface action group together and steam together, that’s what’s rare,” said Rear Adm. Nathan Moore, who was Coast Guard commander for the Alaska region until earlier this month, when he became deputy commander for the Atlantic.

The Coast Guard called in a C-130 Hercules aircraft from another of its bases, on Alaska’s Kodiak Island, and officers aboard the Kimball radioed the Russian and Chinese ships to warn them they had entered U.S.-regulated waters. The Russian and Chinese ships broke formation, turned south and departed.

Once a lonely and largely impassable maritime expanse where countries worked together to extract natural resources, the Arctic is increasingly contested territory. As sea ice melts and traffic increases on the southern edges of the Arctic Ocean, governments are maneuvering in ways that mirror the great-power rivalries seen in lower latitudes.

In recent months, Russian bombers have increased their patrols over the Arctic and have probed further south. Norway’s intelligence service said that with Russia’s conventional forces weakened by the war in Ukraine, its strategic weapons are taking on greater importance, among them the nuclear-armed submarines of Russia’s Northern Fleet. More Russian-flagged commercial and government vessels are active in Arctic waters.

While U.S. military officials and analysts don’t expect Beijing to deploy broad military forces in the Arctic, they said China is sharing satellite and electronic intelligence from the region with Moscow. 

In response, the U.S. is beefing up its presence in the Arctic by adding to its polar icebreakers—the ships vital to a consistent presence in the icy seas. The U.S. has just one icebreaker in the region for only part of the year, compared with three dozen owned by Russia.

It’s also tracking movements of Russia and China via satellites, drones and unmanned seacraft, analysts and military officers said. 

After the U.S. and other Asia-Pacific nations watched Beijing build military installations in the South China Sea, the Pentagon doesn’t want to get caught off guard again, this time near the shores of America, Canada and other NATO allies in Northern Europe. Last fall’s Russian-Chinese exercise triggered “Operation Frontier Sentinel,” Adm. Moore’s plan to respond to foreign military vessels’ unexpected approaches to the U.S. in the region.  

“We’re telling the world, ‘We’re up here patrolling this area,” said the Coast Guard’s Kenneth Boda, who was captain of the Healy, the U.S. icebreaker used in the Arctic, until June. “There are certain things we don’t want you doing up here.”

Testing U.S. resolve

Russia’s defense ministry said the exercises with China, which began in the Sea of Japan, were designed to improve interoperability of the fleets and to defend eastern sea lanes and economic activity. 

“China will not and has no intention of using Arctic issues to promote its geopolitical interests,” Chinese embassy spokesman in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said in a statement.

The Biden administration released a new Arctic strategy in October that identified national security as the main pillar for U.S. interests in the region, ahead of the environment, economic development and international cooperation. The strategy paper said that “Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine has rendered government-to-government cooperation with Russia in the Arctic virtually impossible.”

The Russian-Chinese partnership heightens the challenges faced by America’s military as it enters a new era of great-power competition. For decades, the U.S. has been focused on fighting insurgencies in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and has lately been working to reorient its forces to face a different type of potential conflict. 

“Both Putin and Xi have made clear that the High North is key to their strategic interests, and it is imperative that the United States and our allies keep them from dominating this region,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R., Miss.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

Russian-flagged commercial and government vessels active in Arctic waters rose to a monthly average of 709 last year, up 22% since 2018, according to satellite-tracking data compiled by AAC SpaceQuest for The Wall Street Journal. Among the vessels: the 50 Let Pobedy, a 524-foot nuclear icebreaker named for the anniversary of Russia’s World War II victory. 

China, for its part, is “looking for reasons to have a military presence in the Arctic,” explained Vice Adm. Peter Gautier, the U.S. Coast Guard’s head of operations.

The American public became aware of China’s intelligence-gathering activities near the Arctic earlier this year after a Chinese balloon was first detected near Alaska’s uninhabited St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. The balloon floated across the U.S. and Canada before it was shot down off the coast of South Carolina. 

China’s foreign ministry denied the balloon was for surveillance and criticized the U.S. for shooting it down.

Last year, Canadian officials seized Chinese buoys believed to have been involved in surveillance of U.S. submarines, Canadian officials said this year. U.S. officials are also investigating visits by Chinese nationals in and around U.S. bases, including in Alaska.

“If we’re not there and we allow them to test our waters, it starts to look more like the South China Sea,” said Capt. Stephen Adler, who was then the commander of the Coast Guard Cutter Stratton, on a stop in Dutch Harbor last fall. 

Expanding trade route

The Russia-China security partnership is in part driven by commerce on the energy-rich trade route. 

Warmer temperatures are opening new shipping lanes between Asia and Europe and may eventually introduce brand-new shipping routes near the North Pole. As early as the 2030s, the Arctic may be practically ice-free in September, the month with the lowest amount of ice in the year, according to a June study in Nature Communications.

Shipping companies are studying Russia’s northern coast as the shortest link between seaports of East Asia and Europe, bypassing southern oceans and the Suez Canal. A cargo ship’s trip from Japan to a port in the Netherlands could be cut by more than half, to less than 6,000 miles from more than 12,000 miles, by traveling through the Arctic Ocean. 

The Northern Sea Route, which Russia asserts the right to regulate under an Arctic agreement, allows ships carrying liquefied natural gas to transport the cargo through the Bering Strait. The route runs along the maritime border between Russian and U.S. waters just west of Alaska.

More ice-crushing vessels in the area are ferrying Russian gas to the Chinese market. Last year, Russia and China used a trio of massive ice-breaking ships flying Hong Kong flags to carry Russian LNG to Chinese and other markets, according to the AAC SpaceQuest shipping data. The two countries are looking to double shipments of Russian gas to China. 

The U.S. rejects Russia’s claim to regulate traffic through the Northern Sea Route and has considered contesting it in a so-called freedom of navigation exercise, according to a classified document taken and shared online by Airman First Class Jack Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Such exercises, known as Fonops, involve sailing through waters to contest what the U.S. sees as excessive claims of another nation, including China’s claims in the South China Sea and other areas.

The U.S. looked at an operation that would have navigated the waters of the Northern Sea Route between Pacific and Atlantic ports via the Arctic waters north of Russia. The document’s authenticity couldn’t be independently verified. The U.S. hasn’t carried out a passage through the route. 

According to another leaked document, the U.S. considered conducting an expedition in the Kara Sea, which sits north of Russia, with a NATO warship detachment that was to include as many as four guided-missile destroyers and supply vessels. That move would have violated Russian restrictions on those waters. The documents said Norway supported the U.S. plan, which hasn’t been carried out.

Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh didn’t comment on the leaked document but said: “The United States will fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows, as we do around the world.”

A spokeswoman for the Norwegian Ministry of Defense declined to comment. A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Combat capabilities

While Russia’s vast territory dominates the Arctic coastline, with well-developed ports, airfields and vessels under its control, NATO assets in Canada, Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe would come into play in any potential conflict. 

The U.S. itself has combat capabilities in the Arctic ranging from air bases in Alaska with more than 100 advanced F-35 and F-22 jets, to nuclear-powered submarines roaming the seas that can punch up through the ice, to missile-tracking radar in Greenland.

A new Pentagon planner for the region monitors stepped-up exercises in cold conditions, often with allies in the region. In a February exercise, U.S. Army soldiers from the “Arctic Angels” airborne division flew over the North Pole from Alaska to Finland, where they practiced maneuvers with Norwegian troops.

The frigid deployments are inspiring efforts to deploy unmanned vessels and to innovate for northern fighting forces. Materials scientists are working with the military to improve tools used in icy conditions, for example to prevent frozen spray from accumulating on ships and weapons, a problem previously addressed by a serviceman with a baseball bat. 

The biggest gap between Western nations and the Russia-China partnership is in “domain awareness,” or the knowledge of what adversaries are doing in and around a region with few people and little infrastructure. 

Military officers say fixing that involves adding more satellites to provide better communication on the ground, unmanned aircraft and seagoing vessels, and long-range radar. Ports such as Dutch Harbor also need improvements.

A greater U.S. presence in the region is hobbled by a lack of ships hardened to withstand ice. In comparison, Moscow has invested continuously in ice-hardened ships that can steam through water dotted with “growlers”—small frozen chunks.

The U.S. is lagging behind Russia in true polar icebreakers, which can break through solid ice several feet thick. The massive ships can bring heavy equipment, fuel and supplies through thick sea ice, anywhere from research stations in Antarctica to the North Pole, while also monitoring radio transmissions and shipping and carrying military tools such as helicopters and equipment to cope with accidents or environmental disasters. 

Moscow is looking to increase its large fleet by 2024 with three new “Project 23550” class icebreakers, which are meant to be outfitted with Kalibr cruise missiles. Those icebreakers could travel among a string of new military bases Russia has opened above the Arctic Circle. The bases have also received a fleet of Russia’s Su-34 jet fighters to fly over Arctic waterways.

Today, the U.S. doesn’t have an icebreaker assigned to the Arctic year round. The Healy, a 16,000-ton diesel behemoth, is the Coast Guard’s longest and biggest ship, but it goes for refitting every winter in Washington state or California. 

Maintenance has been expensive for the Healy, and the medium-powered icebreaker faced problems with some of its vital diesel generators last fall after an arduous trip to the North Pole that involved backing away from thick layers of ice, then ramming through them. In 2020, a fire destroyed one of its two massive electric propulsion motors. The maintenance restricts the U.S. from patrolling the surface of the Arctic for nearly half the year. 

Launched and commissioned in the 1990s, before Putin came to power, the Healy is hardly prepared for military confrontation. The ship is packed with heavy-duty scientific equipment and laboratories, but it has no deck guns to defend itself. The Healy has high-tech communications and a helicopter hangar that have military uses, but its focus is earth science, especially geochemistry and climate studies. A recent set of experiments may help the Navy utilize submersibles under the ice, Capt. Boda said. 

The other U.S. polar icebreaker, the Polar Star, is more powerful than the Healy but is at the end of its useful life and is assigned each year to resupplying scientists in Antarctica. 

A joint Navy and Coast Guard program to build more armed and modern icebreakers has been delayed. At the shipyard in Mississippi, a lack of local skilled labor and the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on the international design process has caused the builder, Halter Marine, now owned by Bollinger Shipyards, to miss deadlines on the first icebreaker, which will cost $1 billion, company officials said.

China in 2018 launched a second, domestically built ice-breaking research vessel, the Xue Long 2. That ship operates in the Arctic along with the original Xue Long, meaning “Snow Dragon,” built in Ukraine. 

A year before the Kimball’s encounter with the joint Russian-Chinese squadron, the U.S. Coast Guard’s Stratton spotted one of the ice-breaking Chinese research vessels in the Chukchi Sea, near the U.S. maritime border. The U.S. cutter, which has powerful deck guns and carries a drone, shadowed the Chinese vessel. The reason for tailing the ship, said Adm. Gautier, the Coast Guard’s head of operations, was to “just peacefully exert the fact that there’s U.S. sovereign interests there.”

China now has the world’s largest navy by size, with the cruiser-destroyers like the Nanchang at the heavily armed vanguard. While the U.S. has a qualitative edge with more-advanced warships, including a larger aircraft-carrier fleet, China is building them more quickly, Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet, said in an interview last year with The Wall Street Journal.

China has so far shown little interest in deploying its military on its own in the Arctic, in part because it would tread upon the sensitivities of Moscow, which has long guarded against a Chinese military presence. Instead, Beijing’s strategy is to play a supporting role for Russia in the region. 

Heightened tensions

Not since the Cold War have Arctic tensions between the U.S. and Russia been so high.

In those decades, Russia and members of NATO began monitoring the Arctic, since it was the shortest path for intercontinental missiles and bombers to reach their targets. 

Both sides invested heavily in Arctic facilities, ranging from radar to ice-capable submarines. In the twilight of the Cold War, Soviet and American nuclear submarines collided twice in Arctic waters north of the main Soviet submarine base on Fennoscandia, near the border with Norway, causing damage to the submarines and headaches for diplomats but avoiding a military conflict. 

In 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev signaled a willingness to dial back tensions. He warned in a speech in the Arctic city of Murmansk, Russia, near the submarine base, that the “militarization of this part of the world is assuming threatening dimensions.” 

Three decades later, the seizure of Crimea and the broader invasion of Ukraine have rekindled old tensions, and the U.S. led Western nations to impose a raft of sanctions on Russia’s economy. Western oil and gas giants halted their investment and technology cooperation with Russian firms, especially in technically challenging areas such as the Arctic. On a visit to Nordic countries in June, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the reopening of a Cold War-era diplomatic outpost north of the Arctic Circle in Tromsoe, Norway.

Moscow has been marginalized in the Tromsoe-based Arctic Council, the regional governing group that includes the U.S., Canada and other nations with Arctic territory. Sweden and Finland, which long aspired to neutrality, signed up for NATO, and with the expectation that Sweden will complete its membership soon, Russia will be the only Arctic Council voting nation outside the Western military alliance. Because of the Ukraine war, council meetings were suspended and significant decisions pushed back for the duration of Russia’s two-year rotating chairmanship, which ended in May. 

In the middle of last year, Mr. Putin visited the historic port city of St. Petersburg and announced a new naval doctrine that put the Arctic first among its priority regions and carved out a role for Russian “partner nations,” an apparent reference to China and other allies.

For years, Beijing offered to help develop Russian port facilities in the Arctic regions that would facilitate natural gas shipments to China, but Moscow typically opted for Western firms instead. The Russians no longer have that choice, said Liselotte Odgaard, a professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies in Oslo. “Now they will need Chinese money to do these things that they want to do,” she said. 

Odgaard said no big joint economic ventures have yet been announced, but that they are inevitable. Slowly and carefully, China will use this chance to forge economic ties with Russia in the Arctic, and play a supporting role as Moscow flexes its military muscle there.

— Vivian Salama contributed to this article.

—Design by Andrew Levinson.

Write to William Mauldin at [email protected] and Alan Cullison at [email protected]