Putin’s War in Ukraine has Brought Down a New ‘Ice Curtain’ between Chukotka and Alaska but That is Far from Impermeable, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 12 – After a period of euphoria between the end of Soviet times and the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, contacts between the closely related native peoples of Russia’s Chukota and Alaska have been divided by a new “ice curtain” that fell after Putin expanded his war against Ukraine in 2022, Arseny Karsakov says.

            But this curtain is nowhere near as impermeable as was the Iron Curtain of cold war times, the Posle Media commentator says at the end of a lengthy and detailed survey of the relationships of peoples on the two sides of the Bering Straits since times immemorial (posle.media/article/when-the-whales-leave-again).

            According to Karsakov, memories of closer ties only a few years ago play a major role as do “the internet, kinship ties, certain international organizations and formal agreements which remain in place.” But the relationship has been seriously reduced, undermining these societies and reducing the chance that the world will benefit from their environmental practices.

            “The paradox is that resisting climate change and defending shared endangered animal populations require closer cooperation than ever before but the war in Ukraine has rendered such cooperation less and less possible,” Karsakov says with regret, although he acknowledges that some of the hopeful developments of the 1990s were already undermined by Putin’s securitization of this border region even before 2014.

            Research on the region and contacts between the peoples on the two sides of the straits have dropped. Travel has become almost impossible, but what has kept the hope for better times alive is that people in both Chukotka and Alaska use messenger aps on a daily basis to remain in close touch.

            If Moscow moves further against the Internet, that could inconvenience people in the center of Russia; but in Chukotka, it would destroy what has been a major support for the survival of the peoples of that distant region and even lead to the disappearance of some of them altogether.