War in Ukraine has implications for Arctic co-operation, climate change research

Russia's invasion of Ukraine may seem half a world away, but it has implications for northerners and for circumpolar collaboration on important issues, including climate change, according to Robert Huebert, an associate professor at the University of Calgary whose work focuses on Arctic security and sovereignty. 

The situation also underscores gaps in the Canadian government's approach to its northern defences, Huebert said in an interview with CBC North's Loren McGinnis.  

Huebert describes the situation as horrifying. 

"Any myth that the Russia of old, the aggressor expansionary Russia had been a thing of the past" has been laid to rest, Huebert said. 

"It tells us that the Russians are, in fact, willing to use any means possible to seize the territory of a sovereign state."

This invasion, he said, is a continuation of the war Russia began in 2015 in Ukraine.  

"When you see this type of war that is of such a large scale, anything becomes possible in terms of miscalculations…The NATO countries [are] trying to shore up their abilities to respond to Russia and the possibilities of either intentional or unintentional spillover are very real."

The following has been edited for length and clarity. 

As this conflict has escalated or built up over the last number of days and weeks, how are you looking at this in terms of the Arctic and Canadian North?

There's two major impacts. They are very important to Canada, they're important to the North, and they're important overall. The first is in terms of the ability of the Arctic nations, including the Russians, to get together on meaningful co-operation. And we've seen this in the multilateral agencies, the Arctic Council being the most obvious body. A lot of our understanding of climate change comes from the co-operative sharing of information and science with the Russians within the context of the Arctic Council. We have search and rescue treaties. We have a whole host of very meaningful steps. Those, I'm afraid, are all either going to be frozen or rendered irrelevant. 

With this type of naked aggression on the part of the Russians, I just simply can't see us being able to wait for the killing and dying to stop in Ukraine and then to turn around to the Russians say, "Okay, well, what's the next thing on the agenda for the Arctic Council?" The Russians are the chair of the council right now. As we impose sanctions, as we have said we will, the Russians will then retaliate and the essence of what is required for any form of co-operation will have been eliminated. 

The second is on the military. Our government, ever since it was elected and came up with the defence policy, said one of the most critical things that it needed to do was to modernize the NORAD defensive capabilities. That's the alliance and agreement we have with the Americans to have the shared defence of North American aerospace.   

Hopefully, what this means is that the government is going to realize that we need to be very, very much more active in the redevelopment, modernization of our northern defences. I mean, we're seeing a nakedly aggressive Russia. And therefore it behooves us to ensure that instead of using 1985 technology, which a lot of the North warning system is based on, that we actually modernize it because we're getting a firsthand look at just what a powerful, modern military the Russians have. 

The third thing that's going to happen in the Arctic is, of course, as the sanctions take place, the Russians will turn to the Chinese for assistance. They did it when we imposed the sanctions for when they began the war against Ukraine in 2014, and that gave China a vastly expanded foothold in terms of oil and gas and other opportunities.