The Russian attack on Ukraine has had major consequences thousands of miles from the battlefields. Since Russia launched its invasion in 2022, the state that contains around half of the total landmass above the Arctic Circle has been effectively excluded from the field of transnational Arctic cooperation.
Regardless of the merits of temporarily cutting Russia off, it is the Arctic’s indigenous peoples — with longer histories in the region than the states within whose borders they now find themselves — who have suffered most from the decision and from the broader Arctic fallout of the conflict.
During that time, they have been recruited for war, seen connections across state borders severed, and suffered from a “pause” of the Arctic Council, an international forum where they had fought for representation.
The indigenous peoples of the Arctic already faced marginalization before the war. As Anders Oskal, secretary general of the Association of World Reindeer Herders, said recently: “Those who are hit first and hardest by sanctions are the ones who are last in line to begin with.”
In 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that a wind farm constructed in Sámi territory was a violation of indigenous rights, yet the wind farm, and its disruption to reindeer migration, remains. In the Russian Arctic, the reindeer-herding Nenets people have found migratory routes similarly disturbed by oil and gas infrastructure. Kiruna municipality, in the Swedish heart of Sápmi, the Sámi homeland, is home to the largest underground iron ore mine in the world,…
Auteur: Huw Paige
