The Northeast Passage could enable Russia to blackmail Europe

If climate change can have a silver lining, then some optimists might argue that it probably lies in the Northeast Passage. Last week two German cargo ships sailed part of its course, making their way along Russia’s Arctic coast from South Korea to Siberia, passing through the Bering Strait, with an ease that would have been unthinkable before local sea ice began to feel the heat of global warming.

Already speculation is rife that this heralds the advent of a major new shipping route, running through waters that are expected to eventually become ice-free for much of the year round. This route, it is said, will link Europe with booming Asian markets, slashing distances and journey times through the Suez and Panama Canals by as much as a third. Shippers could then pass their savings onto customers, who would benefit from lower prices in the high street.

The political price of an active Northeast Passage, however, may not be quite so attractive. For what no one has noticed is that it would effectively become a maritime, commercial pipeline – and the story of how the Kremlin views and uses its pipelines elsewhere is by now a highly familiar one.

Moscow would benefit from this commercial pipeline in the Arctic Ocean in two distinct ways. On the one hand it could potentially charge exorbitant transit revenues – thinly disguised as ‘icebreaker fees’, even when such escort is unnecessary – on ships that move through what it regards as its own ‘national waters’. Earlier this year, Russia was levying an extortionate $16 fee on every ton of oil cargo, compared with the meagre $1 that Finland charged Baltic shipping.

But more importantly, the Russians could potentially use the Passage as a political bargaining chip, threatening to block or impede the movement of ships that belong to states that don’t toe the Moscow line. Russia has never shied from using trade sanctions as a political tool – imposing wine sanctions on Georgia and Moldova in 2006, and banning Polish meat imports in 2007 – or from manipulating the flow of natural gas to Ukraine and Moldova. And the advent of a Northeast Passage, or even the very prospect, would add considerable political firepower to the Kremlin’s armoury.

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