From the Financial Times
Denmark has rebuffed Russian attempts to launch talks aimed at swiftly deciding which nations own large swaths of the Arctic, including the North Pole.
Kristian Jensen, Denmark’s foreign minister, told the Financial Times he wanted to stick to a UN process which experts think will take decades to sort out where borders in the Arctic lie.
“We need to apply the international rules. It’s the right way to go forward,” he said.
Sergei Donskoi, Russia’s natural resources minister, last week told President Vladimir Putin that he wanted to start bilateral talks with Denmark this autumn. Denmark and Russia both claim ownership of the North Pole. In total, their Arctic applications overlap by about 550,000 sq km, with both claiming the Lomonosov Ridge that stretches 1,800km from off the coast of Greenland and Canada to Russian waters above eastern Siberia.
Geopolitical tensions over who controls the Arctic have been kept to a minimum so far despite widespread fears over a new “Great Game” between the likes of Russia, the US, Canada, Denmark and Norway.
Any countries’ territory ends 12 nautical miles from its coast in the Arctic while its exclusive economic zone extends 200 nautical miles, leaving a big area currently owned by nobody. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries have a right to submit a claim to any territory they can show to be an extension of their continental shelf. A UN body evaluates the scientific basis for the claims and if they are found to still be overlapping, the countries must negotiate over the borders.
Both Denmark and Russia have submitted claims for the North Pole and the Lomonosov Ridge, while Canada is expected to post a claim in 2018, with experts forecasting it will overlap significantly with the other two. Norway has not laid claim to the North Pole or ridge while the US has not ratified the UN convention.
“It might be too soon to say that we can do this in a bilateral environment. We don’t know about Canada. They can say: ‘Hey, you are dividing our part of the world’,” Mr Jensen said.
Mr Jensen’s predecessor described the UN process as “the big carrot” for the Arctic countries to behave peacefully in resolving the borders, after Denmark spent $50m and 12 years gathering data to back its claim.
Several non-Arctic countries, including China, Japan and India, have taken an active interest in the region, with all three becoming observer states at the Arctic Council, the main intergovernmental body for the far north. Many are wary of countries dividing up the last large piece of unclaimed territory on the planet and home to what is thought to be vast, untapped resources of oil and gas.
Concerns were stoked in 2007 when Russia planted its flag under the North Pole. But western diplomats say the Arctic has been one of the few areas where Russia has been constructive ever since. “Relationships with Russia over the Arctic have remained good even when they have been in trouble elsewhere,” said a Nordic diplomat.
Mr Putin held a meeting on Wednesday with ministers to discuss the Arctic region. According to a transcript from the Kremlin, Mr Donskoi told him that “to speed up the consideration of Russia’s application” he would like to negotiate with Denmark this autumn “on the preliminary delimitation of our adjacent continental shelf territories in the Arctic Ocean”.
Mr Donskoi argued this would help “organise the subsequent events, including proper examination of the geological applications, to avoid any further disputes”.
Heather Exner-Pirot, a Canadian expert on the Arctic, said on Twitter that Russia’s claim was more modest than Denmark’s. She added that Mr Jensen’s swift rebuff of Mr Donskoi’s offer implied that “Denmark thinks it has the stronger claim”.
The Arctic Monitor 