Moscow Wants to Involve China More Deeply in Arctic but Beijing has Adopted ‘Wait and See’ Posture Until Outcome of Ukrainian War is Clearer

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 30 – Russian media are playing up an agreement between Moscow and Beijing signed this week to expand coast guard cooperation in the Arctic (murman.tv/news-n-11036--podpisan-memorandum-o-vzaimoponimanii-mezhdu-federalnoj-sluzhboj-bezopasnosti-rf-i-beregovoj-ohranoj-knr).

            But it seems clear that Moscow is more interested in moving quickly in this direction while China, two Canadian experts say, has adopted “a wait-and-see” attitude about almost everything in the north except the development of hydrocarbons for the Chinese market (ras-nsa.ca/consequences-of-the-war-in-ukraine-in-the-arctic/).

            According to Frédéric Lasserre and Hervé Baudu, Beijing does not appear to want to take any irreversible steps in the Arctic until it knows how the war in Ukraine will turn out. If Russia wins, it wants to be able to exploit that; but if Russia doesn’t, it wants to be sure that it won’t lose anything, yet another way the outcome of the conflict will affect far broader issues.