What Russia says about Svalbard, and what Norway answers

Svalbard stands out in Russia's influence activity against Norway, Kari Aga Myklebost, professor of history at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, told Nettavisen in an interview published on Sunday 1 November, as the Wire reported. For more than a decade, she said, Russian actors, among them state media, have said that Russia holds a special position on Svalbard for historical reasons and that Norway breaches the Svalbard Treaty.

Russia rejects that account. Its foreign ministry called claims of planned Russian hybrid attacks on Svalbard "nothing but conjecture, rumours, in essence fakes" in December 2024 (translated from Russian). This piece sets out what has been said about Svalbard, by whom and when, how Norway has answered, and how one claim travelled. It draws on the Wire's report of 1 November, the paper Myklebost co-wrote for the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) in Helsinki, the Russian foreign ministry's statements as Russian agencies reported them, and Norway's own documents.

How it got here

The Hybrid CoE paper, "Hybrid threats in high latitudes: Facing Russia on Svalbard", by Myklebost, Stian Bones and Thomas Nilsen, published in December 2025, says Russia has escalated "grey-zone provocations, history-based propaganda, and paramilitary and religious symbolism on Svalbard" since 2014.

The first event since 2014 it describes is a surprise visit to Svalbard in April 2015 by Dmitry Rogozin, then Russia's deputy prime minister. When Oslo reacted, Russia's foreign ministry pointed to Article 3 of the Treaty, which gives citizens of the parties free access to the archipelago: the sanctions "in no way cancel this provision", it said, RIA Novosti reported on 20 April 2015 (translated from Russian). In February 2020, as Norway marked the Treaty's centenary, the paper describes "a large-scale Russian information campaign". On 20 February that year foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that "in recent years Oslo is in fact violating the provisions of the treaty", RIA Novosti reported (translated from Russian).

From 2022 the paper records events in Barentsburg and Pyramiden: Victory Day parades and Immortal Regiment marches after a new consul general, Andrey Chemerilo, and a new head of Arktikugol, Ildar Neverov, arrived; a seven-metre Orthodox cross with a St George's ribbon raised in Pyramiden in August 2023; and low-flying helicopters at the 2023 Victory Day parade, which brought a fine from the Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority. In 2025, the paper says, Arktikugol's direct passenger route from Murmansk to Barentsburg "for the first time enabled Moscow's long-held ambition to circumvent Norway's entry regulations". The ship on that route, the Professor Molchanov, has been held in Barentsburg since 2 September over a Ukrainian claim against Russia.

One claim in one day

At 09:02 Moscow time on 16 June 2023 the Telegram channel Mash posted: "A US biological laboratory will appear a few hours by water from Murmansk. According to our information, the US Department of Defense plans to place a military facility on Bear Island in the Norwegian Arctic zone" (translated from Russian). It named no source beyond "our informed interlocutor". The post went on to speak of a virology laboratory.

Within two hours four Russian news sites carried the claim: Rambler at 09:08, Life at 10:13, the Murmansk edition of Moskovsky Komsomolets at 10:55, with "for 100 million dollars" added to its headline, and Versia at 10:59. That evening Channel One's news programme Vremya reported, citing Telegram channels, that "an American biolab may appear" in the Barents Sea (translated from Russian). In late October, at a Russian Geographical Society conference in Murmansk, Natalia Belisheva of the Kola Science Centre said: "It will be a virus-biological laboratory by the Pentagon," the Barents Observer reported on 30 October 2023.

Bjørnøya (Bear Island), Svalbard's southernmost island, has been a nature reserve since 2002, apart from a small area around the weather station in the north, which is kept for the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and other scientific work. A 2010 amendment extended the protected sea around it from 4 to 12 nautical miles. The Hybrid CoE paper calls Mash's post disinformation, published while the Storting's foreign affairs and defence committee was visiting Bjørnøya and Longyearbyen that summer. "The disinformation did not reach the international media," it says.

The Treaty argument

Article 9 of the Svalbard Treaty says Norway undertakes "not to create nor to allow the establishment of any naval base" in the territories and "not to construct any fortification" there, which "may never be used for warlike purposes".

Russia's foreign ministry has applied the article to SvalSat, the satellite ground station on Platåberget above Longyearbyen. In November 2021 Zakharova called the station "technically equipped to carry out dual-use tasks", Interfax reported (translated from Russian). On 18 December 2024 she said Norway is obliged "not to create or allow the creation of infrastructure that can be used for purposes of war" (translated from Russian). On 14 March 2025 the ministry told Norway's ambassador, Robert Kvile, that Svalbard "is increasingly being drawn into the orbit of Norway's military-political planning with the involvement of the US and NATO", Kommersant reported (translated from Russian).

Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre answered the next day: "Norway fully respects the Svalbard Treaty" (translated from Norwegian). The government's 2024 white paper on Svalbard says Article 9 "is not a ban on all military activity" (translated from Norwegian): it is aimed at naval bases, fortifications and activities with warlike purposes. Norway's ground-station regulation of 2017 says a station on Svalbard may not send data to or read data from "a satellite that performs functions specifically for military purposes" (translated from Norwegian).

Cargo for Barentsburg

In late May 2022, 20 tonnes of goods in two containers for Barentsburg were stopped at the Storskog border crossing, NRK reported. Russian truck drivers who came to the border from Murmansk were not allowed to enter, the Barents Observer reported, and on 15 June Norway's foreign ministry refused an application to take the goods by road across the mainland. On 29 June Russia's foreign ministry summoned Norway's chargé d'affaires and said "unfriendly actions against Russia will inevitably lead to appropriate retaliatory measures", The Moscow Times reported.

On the weekend of 2 and 3 July a Norwegian haulier drove the two containers from Storskog about 800 kilometres to Tromsø, from where a cargo boat took them north, the Barents Observer reported on 6 July. "We are glad that this case has been resolved in a good way," the foreign ministry's spokesperson, Ane Haavardsdatter Lunde, told NRK, the Barents Observer reported. The Hybrid CoE paper calls the stories of "Norway's blockade" creating a humanitarian crisis in Barentsburg "unfounded". The sanctions ended only Arktikugol's own choice of sending the goods through mainland Norway, the paper says, and Norway proposed other arrangements, including shipping directly from Murmansk to Barentsburg.

The figures

Norway's Police Security Service (PST) publishes a threat assessment every year. It named Svalbard in 2021, and in every year from 2023 to 2026; the assessments of 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2022 do not mention it. In 2024 it wrote that "Svalbard and the border areas in Finnmark are of particularly great strategic importance for Russia"; in 2026, that the northernmost counties and Svalbard are "of particular interest and therefore especially exposed to intelligence and influence activity" (translated from Norwegian).