The Arctic Council Is Frozen Solid
In 2022, the seven Western members of the Arctic Council — the US, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Iceland — suspended participation in all meetings co-chaired by Russia. Moscow held the rotating presidency. The body, which had spent three decades quietly managing one of the world’s most consequential regions, stopped functioning almost overnight.
What followed was silence dressed up as procedure. Working groups on shipping lanes, indigenous rights, environmental monitoring, and search-and-rescue coordination went dark. The Council technically still exists. It does not, in any meaningful sense, work.
This matters more than it registers in Western press. The Arctic is not static. Ice retreat is accelerating, opening routes that compress transit times between Asia and Europe by weeks. Undersea resource claims are being staked. Russian military infrastructure in the high north has expanded continuously regardless of the diplomatic freeze. China — not a Council member — has declared itself a “near-Arctic state” and deepened logistical ties with Moscow in the region.
The Council’s original value was not that it resolved disputes. It was that it created the habit of talking — a channel that functioned even during Cold War friction because both sides found it useful. That habit is now broken. Rebuilding it after the Ukraine war ends, whenever that is, will require Russia to have an interest in re-engagement and the West to offer something worth engaging over.
Neither condition currently exists. In the meantime, the Arctic is being shaped by actors who have no interest in the Council’s revival and every interest in the vacuum it left behind.