Cold War legacies in Russia’s Svalbard policy - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 23

relevant to Russia's securitization of the Svalbard radar issue: the eastward
enlargement of NATO, Norway's adaptation of its self-imposed restrictions
on allied military activity east of the 24th meridian and the United States'
announcement of its intention to withdraw from the 1972 US-Soviet Anti-
Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. These three factors are frequently mentioned
in Russian news articles and policy documents dealing with the Svalbard issue
and Russia's security situation (e.g. Fedorov et al . 2001:3).
The eastward expansion of NATO, as outlined in the 1995 Study on
Enlargement, was perceived in Russia as a 'betrayal' (Lukin 1995:3) and a
'logical justification for Russian military elites to continue to perceive the
West as a potential enemy' (Barany 2007:185). NATO's membership invita-
tion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, as well as its commitment
to further expansion of the Alliance into the Baltic and the Balkans, led a
majority of Russians to believe that their country was increasingly being
'encircled' by its former adversary and that political and military counter-
measures were necessary in order to maintain security on the Western front.
On NATO's northern flank, the Norwegian Government's decision in
1997 to lift some of Norway's self-imposed restrictions on foreign military
activity east of the 24th meridian, that is, in the country's northernmost and
easternmost land, sea and air space, was interpreted in Russia as yet another
potentially threatening departure from the status quo. The adaptation, which
in Norway was seen as a step towards a 'normalization' of the situation in the
northern border region, was not well received by the Russian military and secu-
rity establishment, which feared an increase in the number and scale of NATO
exercises close to Russia's northwestern border. Russia's decision to turn down
a Norwegian invitation to participate in the 1999 'Barents Peace' exercise, a
NATO/Partnership for Peace activity, was regarded as 'a logical political step'
(Fedorov et al . 2001:3). The 'Barents Peace' exercise took place shortly after
the Kosovo war, which apparently made Russian participation even less likely
(Smolenskiy 2000). But a major source of concern for the Russians in connec-
tion with the developments in northern Norway, on Svalbard and in NATO's
new member countries was the signals coming from Washington in the late
1990s about a possible termination of the 1972 ABM Treaty.
To fully understand how and why the radar issue was placed on Russia's
post-Cold War security agenda, one needs to take into consideration the
foreign policy context at the time, and, perhaps equally important, the pre-
history of Soviet-Norwegian disagreements over the interpretation of the
Svalbard Treaty and over the status of the strategically located archipelago.
Both factors appear to have served as 'facilitating conditions' for securitization.
The fear of being denied access to the open sea, that is, the North Atlantic,
and later the Arctic Ocean, had concerned Russians ever since World War II. In
1944, the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov presented Norwegian Ambassador
Trygve Lie with a proposal to revise the Svalbard Treaty (1944-1947) and
turn the archipelago into a Soviet-Norwegian condominium (Lie 1958:158).