Moscow Increases Its Focus on Two North Atlantic Archipelagos – Denmark’s Faeroes and Norway’s Svalbard

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 30 – Over the last several years, Russian analysts and commentators have talked about islands in the Baltic Sea – Gotland, the Aaland Island and Bornholm – and in particular two archipelagos in the North Atlantic – Denmark’s Faroes and Norway’s Svalbard as possible targets of future Russian moves against the West.

            Russian writers have devoted especial attention to the Faroes and Svalbard because while they belong to two NATO countries, they have special legal regimes, the first a 1920 treaty which gives signatories the right to engage in economic activity there and the second because of an arrangement by which the Faroes are not always subject to EU arrangements.

            (For background on these two objects of such interest, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/12/with-trump-again-talking-about.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/12/moscow-promises-response-to-faroe.html for the Faroes and jamestown.org/moscow-using-svalbard-to-test-natos-readiness-and-resolve/ jamestown.org/moscows-first-move-against-nato-could-take-place-in-norways-svalbard-archipelago/ for Svalbard.)

            This past week, Moscow commentators have devoted more attention to these two archipelagos, a possible indication that the Kremlin is considering moves against one or both and is laying the groundwork with arguments Russia would likely use in the hopes of dividing the West in such a case.

            On the Strategic Culture Foundation portal, Dmitry Minin argues that Norwegian officials need to recognize that Moscow is not a threat to Oslo’s control over Svalbard but defends the 1920 treaty which awarded that archipelago to Norway (fondsk.ru/news/2026/01/30/ssha-v-arktike-za-grenlandiey-posleduet-shpicbergen.html).

            And that should become ever more obvious if as seems like the United States having declared that it must control Greenland for its national security should decide at some point in the future that it needs to bring Svalbard under its direct administration as well, the Moscow commentator says. 

            Unfortunately, he says, Oslo doesn’t act on the basis of an adequate appreciation of that threat; and in 2022, it extended its EU sanctions against Russia to Svalbard, thus violating the provisions of the 1920 accord and opening the way to an American move  against that archipelago and thus against Norway.

            In this situation, Russia is the chief defender of Norwegian sovereignty and control over Svalbard, Minin says, thus using the kind of argument it has employed before when it has suggested that it is the defender of those whom others are supposedly attacking or ready to attack as justification for Russian moves. 

            The article about the Faeroes is likely to attract less attention but it too contains a not so implicit threat that Denmark is acting in ways that challenge the status quo and that Russia will seek to defend that status quo by trying to mobilize the people of the Faeroes against Copenhagen.

            In the Military-Political Analytics portal,  Moscow analyst Aleksey Baliyev says that Copenhagen’s moves to have the Faeroes join the EU sanctions regime against Russia violates a 1977 agreement which allowed the Faeroes to operate independently of EU rules (vpoanalytics.com/sobytiya-i-kommentarii/farerskie-ostrova-v-tumane-soglashenie-1977-goda-stavitsya-pod-vopros/).

            The issue now concerns fishing quotas. Russia had fishing quotas in the waters around the Faeroes that had not been restricted by EU sanctions, but now Copenhagen is seeking to force the Faeroes to follow those sanctions, something that has outraged Moscow and led it to express the hope that the Faeros regional parliament won’t go along.

            Again, as in the case of the Svalbard controversy, Moscow wants to present itself as a defender of the existing rules of the game and to shift the blame away from itself to others when they have been changed, an approach the Kremlin has often followed when it plans to change them even more by its own actions. 

 

Memes Playing Increasingly Important Role in Russian Discussions about Putin’s War in Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 30 – Memes are playing an increasingly important role in Russian discussions about Putin’s war in Ukraine not only because the Kremlin has made the open discussion of that conflict difficult but because memes offered by one side in the debate can be transformed ironically into memes reflecting the views of their opponents.

            The Moscow Times has now compiled a list of some of the most important of these memes and discussed their transformation in ways that their original authors certainly did not intend (themoscowtimes.com/2026/01/30/inside-the-dark-humor-of-russias-wartime-memes-a91814).

            Perhaps the most notable of these memes, the paper suggests, was Goida! An archaic Russian battle cry that a pro-Kremlin actor used in a September 2022 speech. His words were directed at those supporting the war, but opponents of the Kremlin picked it up and “repurposed it as a sarcastic punchline,” often posting it “under news of Russia’s failures and setbacks.”

            “A related meme, ‘Goooa! The paper suggests “comes from a cartoon in which a bear mistakenly celebrates a card game against Uncle Sam,” mocking ‘pro-war celebrations or political theater. Both expressions are also often deployed out of context as absurdist punchlines.”

            Another meme used by both sides in this debate is “our elephant,” used by Kremlin supporters to express respect for those abroad who support Russia and by Kremlin opponents as an ironic reference to “the Soviet-era joke that mocked the USSR’s tendency to exaggerate its achievements” as when it claimed that “’Russia is the homeland of elephants.’”

            Other memes which have undergone a similar evolution are SVO, the abbreviation of “special military operation” as the Kremlin calls its war, MAX, the name of the Kremlin-promoted internet app, Ukraine’s supposed plan to attack Belarus, and Prigozhin’s statement that he had 25,000 supporters who would “soon sort things out.”

            Because irony is more easily denied than most other forms of speech, Russians can use this in ways that are not as likely to land them in trouble with the authorities. But because of this trend with memes, sorting out who is who as far as the debate on the war is concerned has become far more difficult.

Ethnic Bullying in Russia Fundamentally Different from Ordinary Bullying Because ‘Nationality Can’t Be Changed,’ Tomilina Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 31 – Russian officials and commentators loyal to the Kremlin do everything they can to suggest that clashes between members of different ethnic or religious groups are not ethnic or religious conflicts, preferring to insist that these are driven by other factors that are more immediately important.

            That approach until recently has extended to bullying along ethnic or religious lines in Russian schools. But in 2025, the Guild of Interethnic Journalism carried out a project to “STOP EthnoBullying” among young people in the Russian Federation and has now held a conference about the lessons learned (nazaccent.ru/content/45095-stop-etnobulling-itogi-i-perspektivy/).

            Among those who carried out this project and then spoke at the conference was Inna Tomilina, a Moscow psychologist and business coach, who said that focus groups in eight federation subjects confirmed that “children out of insecurity, shy away from people who are different from them … and that this misunderstanding often leads to bullying.”

            She stressed that “ethno-bullying is different from regular bullying. A situation leading to bullying in children’s groups can be corrected by improving academic performance, building physical skills or if need be changing schools. [But] nationality cannot be changed.” (stress supplied)

            Unfortunately, Tomilina said, “no one in Russia is yet talking about ethno-bullying as a phenomenon.” Indeed, she suggested, the very first articles about this phenomenon and practical tools to combat it “appeared precisely during the STOP EthnoBullying project carried out over the last year.

            For the Kremlin, Tomilina’s suggestion that “nationality cannot be changed” is close to a provocation; but her insistence that ethnic conflicts among the young are fundamentally different from other kinds of conflicts is a point of view that may inspire more attention to what is clearly a growing problem not only among school-age children but among adults as well. 

Moscow Continues to Use Outdated Infrastructure Plans Drawn Up More than Half a Century Ago, Baliyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 1 – That the Russian government continues to depend on the achievements of the Soviet Union in various sectors is widely recognized. That it continues to rely on plans the Soviets made but never released is much less so, although with the passing of time, that dependence may place even more limits on what Moscow can do now, Aleksey Baliyev says.

            In an essay on the Military-Political Analytics portal about railway development plans in the southern portions of the Russian Federation continue to be based on Soviet plans from as long ago as the early 1950s without changing them to reflect changes in the situation there (vpoanalytics.com/point-of-view/mezhregionalnye-infrastrukturnye-izyany-mnozhatsya-i-chrevaty/).

            A large fraction of railway development projects included in the Russian Federation’s current development plan for the rest of this decade are little more than copies of projects that were finalized by the early to mid-1950s and not modified in any significant way despite all the changes in the world since then, Baliyev continues..

            This situation, the analyst says, “shows that a comprehensive approach, one which takes into account both existing trends and anticipated developments does not yet prevail in the planning of transport infrastructure development in the Russian Federation” despite all the talk about modernization.

            This pattern is “detrimental to the economy and social sphere of the regions lying along these routes, to economic relations with neighboring countries, and to the ensuring of the country’s security” given the possibility of military actions. Existing plans from the past need to be changed given the demands of the present and the future.