Thomas Nilsen

Putin ordered nuclear exercise with launches of multiple missiles

Ballistic missiles were launched from submarines in the Barents- and Okhotsk Seas. Long-range aircraft were also in the air with dummy nukes.
October 11, 2018

Kremlin downplays possible Putin-Trump Arctic summit in Finland

President Niinistö, though, says there are progress in the plans for a Arctic Summit in Finland next year.
October 11, 2018

Coal mining clean-up job at Svalbard will cost minimum €74 million

Norwegian Government grants 331 million kroner (€35 million) for 2019, but that is just the start.
October 11, 2018

Nikora calls for oil refinery on Kola

The Murmansk Deputy Governor wants to earn more money on Russia’s Arctic oil.
October 09, 2018

Melting glaciers at Novaya Zemlya contain radiation from nuclear bomb tests

A science expedition to the area has discovered “big concentrations of radioactivity” in the ice – and concludes that the glaciers are melting into the sea at record speed.
October 09, 2018

Thawing permafrost makes big trouble for world's northernmost town

Houses are sagging in Longyearbyen and the unstable ground around the famous seed vault is now frozen artificially while the entrance to the tunnel is being re-built.
October 09, 2018

We have 12 years to halve global emissions, UN scientists say

UN Climate Panel tells world leaders to take far-reaching and unprecedented action to avoid irreversible changes to life on planet earth.
October 08, 2018

Loading of nuclear fuel to floating power plant completed in Murmansk

Reactor testing starts later in October or in November.
October 03, 2018

Russia flexes northern military muscles ahead of NATO exercise

Northern Fleet’s brand new frigate «Admiral Gorshkov» has sailed on Barents Sea combat training mission. So have nuclear submarines and strategic bombers.
October 03, 2018

Pyramiden - A Soviet ghost town in Arctic Norway

This was once upon a time the world's northernmost kindergarten and primary school. Abandoned twenty years ago, Pyramiden coal-mining town on the northern edge of the world is a preserved display of what the Soviet Union wanted to offer in the Arctic if communism worked. It didn’t.
October 03, 2018

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Thomas Nilsen is editor of the Independent Barents Observer with its news desk located in Kirkenes, northern Norway. He has a long experience in media cooperation across the borders in the high north of Europe, both as radio- and newspaper reporter all the way back to the days before the breakup of the Soviet Union. 

Nilsen has been editor of Barents Observer since 2009.

He was Deputy Head of the Norwegian Barents Secretariat from 2004-2009. Until 2003, he worked 12 years for the Bellona Foundation’s Russian study group, focusing on nuclear safety issues and general environmental challenges in northern areas and the Arctic. 

Thomas has been traveling extensively across northern Scandinavia and Arctic Russia since the late 80’s working for different media and organizations. He is also a guide at sea and in remote locations in the Russian north for various groups and regularly lectures on security issues, environmental and socio-economic development.

Thomas Nilsen studied at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Mobile: +47-90573143

thomas@thebarentsobserver.com
@nilsen.thomas