Defence minister expects competition for Arctic to grow

Competition for the Arctic will increase as the polar ice melts and new sailing routes open, the defence minister, Tore O. Sandvik, told the magazine Forsvarets forum in a report from Svalbard published on Saturday 14 November. The magazine visited Longyearbyen in April.

Sandvik said the volumes shipped by the north-east passage through the Arctic will be small for the foreseeable future, but that in the long run the changes make the Arctic more strategically important. The voyage from Shanghai to Rotterdam can become 5,000 km shorter.

In a speech on 26 January 2026, published by the Government, Sandvik said there is broad agreement in NATO on the need to strengthen security in the Arctic, Greenland included. The Arctic is strategically important to both Russia and China, the intelligence service of the armed forces wrote in Fokus 2026, its assessment for the year, which closed for editing on 23 January 2026. There are signs that the Kremlin seeks to make the Russian settlement of Barentsburg less dependent on Norwegian infrastructure for supplies and transport, the service wrote. One planned measure is regular ship calls from Russia. The Russian presence on Svalbard will in the main still rest on coal mining, tourism and research.

Inger Haugland, head of counter-intelligence at the police security service, confirmed to the magazine that there have been situations on Svalbard that can be read as a hybrid threat. It is the same in Finnmark, and several of the situations can also have other explanations, she said.

Professor Njord Wegge said he does not see a large risk that the present tensions alone lead to an invasion of Svalbard. Russia's armed forces are short of capacity while the country fights a full-scale war in Ukraine, he said. If a large conflict broke out, Svalbard would at once become a strategically important area.

Andreas Soløy, a fisheries inspector on the coastguard ship Svalbard, told the magazine the coastguard does not usually have problems with Russian ships. If anything, he said, Russian fishing crews have become more careful to follow the fisheries rules.

Embla Abild, 18, led the youth council in Longyearbyen until 2026. She said that when Donald Trump spoke earlier in 2026 of taking over Greenland, several people in the town asked what they would do if the same happened to Svalbard. That debate has calmed down.

Special: Russia on Svalbard

Coverage: Forsvarets forum