The message is all too explicit: “We are in charge in the Arctic”. And to make it concrete, the Kremlin has staged an unprecedented showdown, demonstrating the capabilities of its departments. A week of combined missions near the North Pole, the new Eldorado where global warming is opening up unprecedented perspectives, between shipping routes and raw material deposits. And where for this reason the armed challenge between the great powers returns.
The highlight of the exercise was the simultaneous emergence of three nuclear submarines, which pierced the ice sheet at a distance of one hundred meters from each other. A record. The admiral Nikolai Evmenov, Navy number one, explained the operation to the president Vladimir Putin in person, exhibiting photos of the three turrets that emerge from the perennial white: “This is the first time in history”.
It is not just a propaganda show but the testimony of knowing how to act as a team, coordinating the actions of missile-launching submarines even under two meters of ice: an extreme environmental situation, where communications are problematic. And this was the theme of the whole Umka-2021 exercise: to show the West how advanced Russian training to fight in the Arctic has been, despite temperatures of minus thirty and lashing winds.
All the armed forces were involved, alternating symbolic moments with missions of military importance. A pair of Mig-31 fighters flew over the exact point of the North Pole, only to be refueled in the sky by a flying tanker. Although dated, the Mig-31 remains the fastest interceptor in the world: the only one capable of touching Mach 3, which is triple the speed of sound. And it remains a powerful tool for controlling the region’s airspace.
At the same time, the Arctic Motorized Brigade simulated ground offensives and raids against positions, using special vehicles and weapons modified to function in those limit temperatures. Again, this is a unique unit: no Western army has a department created for the Arctic climate. Nearly four hundred men, trained and equipped to fight in the toughest conditions of all. Only in recent months has Britain been allocating the Royal Marines to interventions beyond the Polar Circle while the Pentagon has recently decided to entrust this task to the Marines.
Finally, the exhibition of nuclear submarines. With torpedo launches into the abyss against naval targets and the preparation of holes in the pack ice to allow missiles to strike while the boat remains submerged: an attack technique that would make submarines invisible to aerial reconnaissance and satellite espionage.
The scenes of the submarines struggling with the ice wall have been the protagonists of several films, from “Arctic Base Zebra” with Rock Hudson to “Firefox, fox of fire” with Clint Eastwood. Harrison Ford he impersonated the captain of the Soviet K-19 who damaged the nuclear engine in one of these emergencies in 1961: most of the crew sacrificed themselves to prevent the accident from causing a radioactive catastrophe. And everything was kept secret until 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev he declassified the documents and proposed to award the K-19 heroes with the Nobel Peace Prize.
Other times. Now the tension of the Cold War is back. The last exercise was held in the area between the Franz Josef archipelago and the Alexandra island. They are considered the northernmost European lands, which have always been of strategic importance. During the Second World War the Germans built a series of outposts there, mainly intended for the fundamental meteorological surveys to hunt down the Allied convoys in the Atlantic. Then the Soviet Union had built a base on Alexandra Island, with an airport for connections and to monitor the US submarine fleet. Abandoned after the collapse of the USSR, the installation was refurbished in 2017, transforming it into the Russian fortress for the conquest of the Arctic with fuel depots, garages for tracked vehicles, hangars for aircraft and helicopters. A springboard towards the colonization of the Polo, with a new gold rush in the wake of atomic boats. Admiral Evmenov also reiterated this: “Arctic explorations will continue, to allow the development of new areas never reached before”.
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