Five years ago the EU's Arctic policy still left room for Russia as a partner. The new one does not. The Commission and Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign policy chief, unveiled a strategy on Tuesday that treats the High North as a security frontier first and a climate issue second.
Ursula von der Leyen put it bluntly: the Arctic is a place where "the tectonic plates of geopolitics are colliding", and sovereignty and territorial integrity can no longer be taken for granted. Kallas pointed to Russia's growing military footprint in the region, citing drone incursions, GPS jamming and sabotage of undersea cables. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the era of "high north, low attention" is over.
The centrepiece is a maritime security hub. At first it would help member states and partners pool information and watch activity in Arctic waters. Over time it would also track shadow fleet tankers, spot illegal fishing and pollution, and coordinate search and rescue. The strategy also promises to expand European icebreaker capacity, a theme that ten-plus member states had already pushed at their Rovaniemi summit weeks earlier.
On infrastructure, the EU will back a pan-Arctic fibre-optic project that connects Greenland directly to Europe, with the wider plan reaching Canada, Japan and South Korea. The IRIS² satellite constellation is meant to provide secure government communications, and is widely read as a European answer to Starlink. Draft versions also pointed to Arctic spaceports in Norway and Sweden, at Andøya and Esrange. Several of these projects reduce reliance on American providers. That is not an accident.
The 2021 strategy called for a multilateral moratorium on new Arctic oil, coal and gas extraction. That ambition has been dropped. The Commission still says oil, coal and gas should stay in the ground, including in the Arctic, but it no longer asks other countries to sign up to a ban.
The shift goes further on minerals. The strategy explicitly supports extraction of critical raw materials, including molybdenum in Greenland, copper and precious metals in Finland and Norway, and rare earths in Sweden. The EU says it will work with Canada, Greenland, Norway and the United States on strategic raw materials partnerships. Norway, which is pushing Arctic drilling of its own, has reason to be pleased.
The timing is not subtle. Donald Trump has repeatedly demanded control of Greenland. His tone has softened this year after a security arrangement with Denmark and Greenland, but many in Europe remain wary. Last month leaders from a dozen countries, among them Germany, France, Finland and Denmark, urged the EU to take a more strategic role in the region and named Russia as the largest threat, while noting the ambitions of China and the US. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said the Arctic should be treated as a strategic frontier.
The strategy is a statement of intent more than a budget. It names projects but, in the text reported so far, attaches few figures, and most of the real money will have to come from the next EU budget, which is still being fought over. Watch three things: whether the maritime security hub gets staff and funding, whether Greenland and Denmark sign up to the cable, and how Norway reconciles its drilling plans with a strategy that says fossil fuels should stay in the ground. The more lasting change is political. Brussels has stopped describing the Arctic as a place for cooperation with Moscow, and started describing it as a place to defend.
