The northern explorer-turned-sanctioned-lawmaker is likely most famous for his 2007 North Pole dive to 4,200 meters below the Arctic Ocean where he planted the Russian flag.
Russia’s Justice Ministry on Friday added the Put’ Domoi (The Way Home), a group consisting of wives, mothers and sisters of soldiers, to the list of so-called ‘foreign agents’.
30 of 35 cruise missiles launched by Russia’s Tu-95MS strategic bombers on the night to Saturday were shot down, but the few that made it through Ukraine's air defence caused severe damage.
Norway’s UNIS - The University centre in Svalbard - shall be the only to offer higher education, the Government’s Report to the Parliament makes clear.
The jamming now seen practically every day in airspace over eastern Finnmark is likely a spillover effect of Russian electromagnetic defence measures for their own military installations, says Nicolai Gerrard with the Norwegian Communications Authority.
The area closed for shipping and aviation is at the nearest just 4 nautical miles from where Russia’s land border with Norway meets the maritime border into the Barents Sea.
An extensive Search- and Rescue exercise took place this week headed by the Marine Rescue Service of Murmansk in cooperation with FSB Border Guards and the military Northern Fleet.
Thomas Nilsen is editor of the Barents Observer. 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 Russia and the Arctic.
Thomas has been traveling extensively across northern Scandinavia and Arctic Russia since the late 80’s working for different media and NGOs. He has also been a guide at sea and in remote locations in the Russian north for various groups and regularly lectures on security, environment and Russia’s repressive influence operations.
In 2017, FSB declared Thomas Nilsen persona non grata (PNG) and since 2019 the censorship agency Roscomnadzor has attempted to block the Barents Observer from the Russian internet.
Thomas Nilsen studied at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.