"I am deeply worried if Russia has started to move nuclear waste from the Kola Peninsula to the Arctic archipelago," says Frederic Hauge with the Bellona foundation.
Helsinki can’t tell exactly how much it costs, but significant resources are sent north to hinder Russian cars from entering any of the six cross-border roads.
The lawyer of the former Wagner warrior says the man was not planning a return to Russia. "He only wanted to visit the Norwegian-Russian border areas in connection with a documentary project."
15 warships, submarines, support vessels, aircraft and coastal units are involved as the Northern Fleet starts an exercise that stretches all along Russia’s Arctic, from the Barents Sea in the West to the East Siberian Sea.
Sergei Lavrov on Monday informed the other members of the Barents Cooperation about the withdrawal from the official structures where Russia has been frozen out since the start of the all-out war against Ukraine.
The minibus with Russian citizens on their way home from Norway was hit by a stolen truck Saturday afternoon. This was the second fatal accident along the border road in two days.
A satellite image from September 14 shows several vessels close to shore near the military top-secret Pankovo test site. Air space and waters in a distance of about 300 kilometers along the west coast of Novaya Zemlya in the Barents Sea will remain closed until September 24.
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.