The unique potential of the Arctic as a point of potential cooperation between the U.S. and Russia was the subject of an event, “2025 Russia-U.S. Relations: Can Arctic Science Diplomacy Mend Strategic Fences?”, hosted by the Arctic Initiative at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

Cooperation on the Arctic between Russia and the U.S. was one of the many casualties of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Arctic Initiative senior fellow Margaret Williams noted at the beginning of the discussion that Russia’s invasion and the nearly three years of war that have followed have had a profound impact on Ukraine’s natural heritage. “Ukrainian people have suffered so deeply, and Ukrainian natural areas, and the environment have suffered terribly as well,” Williams told the event, which took place on Dec. 5, 2024.

Moving on to the Arctic, Williams said some scientific studies indicate that the area is warming three to four times faster than the rest of the world, which in turn is causing a disastrous ripple effect, from disrupted weather patterns to vanishing permanent sea ice, thawing permafrost and rising sea levels. “These are critical problems, and Russia is key to solving them,” Williams said. Williams reminded the event’s audience that “Russia occupies half of the Arctic coastline, more than half of the northern hemisphere's permafrost occurs in Arctic in the Russian Arctic.” Russia is inextricably bound up in the critical problems facing the Arctic; however, Williams worries that the rift between Russia and the West will only grow. 

Williams highlighted the Bering Sea, the northern stretch of the Pacific Ocean located between Russia’s far east coast and Alaska, as the place where “challenges are coming together.” It is “a place where we share tremendous cultural heritage, where people have been living for thousands of years, where fish stocks are shared where wildlife migrates back and forth. They don't pay attention to the boundaries. They don't pay attention to the war,” Williams said. “How can we move ahead at this very, very difficult time … finding ways to think of the long term future and our own survival?” 

Russian marine biologist Masha Vorontsova, founder of the Russia Office of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, also spoke at the event , sharing her personal experience and recent experience traveling to Russia. She emphasized the vital role of Track 2 diplomacy within the scientific community. “We should think of track 2 right when cooperation is not possible at the level of the government, when there [are] no dialogues between the diplomats. When it was completely impossible to reach any agreements, we should think about our contacts among civil society, among scientists, and try to build on these contacts,” Vorontsova said. 

According to Vorontsova, 5,000 or so scientists who signed a letter against the war in Ukraine shortly after the full-scale invasion began have found themselves on an unofficial blacklist. During her summer 2024 trip to Russia, she noticed that Russians are constructing “bubbles” in which to live and function, both at the familial and professional level. “Scientists are building … bubbles,” Vorontsova said. “I had been to several institutions. And it was like the 1980s when everybody [is] actively working, because that was the small corner of freedom to be in your lab in your institution and work.”

She stressed the importance of reaching out to the Russian scientific community to keep making holes in a new Iron Curtain. “If we're speaking of collaboration, my suggestion is, look … to the scientists inside Russia whom you trust,” Vorontsova said. “Pick them up, work with them, exchange emails, make Zooms, invite them to participate in Zooms. Invite them also out of Russia, try to get them to the conferences.” 

Pavel Devyatkin of the Institute of the Arctic agreed, but argued that “there is no sweeping ban on cooperation from the side of the Kremlin.” “I agree with what Masha mentioned about holding on to small bubbles, and how important it is to still work with Russian scientists and continue to invite Russians to participate in conferences and projects,” Devyatkin said in a comment. “There's a whole generation of young Russian scientists who are interested in Arctic cooperation.”

Marisol Maddox, a senior Arctic Policy fellow at Dartmouth College’s Institute of Arctic Studies, spoke to the difficulty of re-building cooperative mechanisms once they’ve been broken down. “We've seen that if you lose a cooperative mechanism, if you kick Russia out of something, or Russia fully leaves a body, it's much harder to then build back that basic cooperative mechanism as opposed to something like the Arctic Council, which I think has really masterfully handled the situation with Russia in the Arctic,” Maddox said.

Maddox then outlined some potential areas for Track 2 cooperation of Western countries with Russia on the Arctic. “How do we promote cooperation? That is also respecting the safety concerns of our Russian colleagues in Russia, because of the constraints that they are also dealing with from the Putin regime,” Maddox said. “But things like fisheries, permafrost monitoring, biosecurity and pandemic prevention, radioactivity and the whole kind of nuclear legacy of waste these are areas where it's really in our interest to be working together.”

Despite the extreme low point of U.S.-Russian relations, climate change and its effects on the Arctic will continue to impact both the U.S. and Russia. “Russia has pretty extensive exposure to climate hazards as well, and really needs this cooperation,” Maddox said. “But we all need this cooperation.”

Angelina Flood is the managing editor of Russia Matters. Opinions expressed herein are solely those of the individuals quoted. Photo by AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File.