Lure of the north: What Russia’s Arctic can offer Trump

The vast, desolate Arctic frontier, rich in untapped energy and mineral resources, has long been dominated by Russia with its massive icebreaking fleet and extensive infrastructure inherited from the Soviet era.

But as the Trump administration’s own Arctic ambitions and rapport with President Vladimir Putin grow, Moscow is seeking to leverage its Arctic riches and America’s interest to lobby for much-anticipated sanctions relief and use the icy region as a testing ground for rebuilding ties with the United States.

Speaking to reporters on March 13, President Donald Trump signaled the Arctic is on top of America’s priority list and reiterated his wish to get Greenland, a Danish territory. In remarks Thursday from Murmansk, in Russia’s Arctic, Putin spoke favorably of those plans, calling it a “profound mistake to treat it as some preposterous talk.”

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy who has been ferrying messages from Washington to Moscow, suggested in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the United States and Russia are “thinking about how to integrate their energy policies in the Arctic” and “share sea lanes, maybe send LNG gas into Europe together,” referring to liquefied natural gas.

Russia, which saw an opening in Trump’s business-first approach, swooped into renewed talks with U.S. delegations with business proposals, offering access to the country’s mineral reserves and joint ventures in the Arctic.

“The Arctic is too important for Cold War-style politics. Russia & the U.S. must find common ground to ensure stability, resource development & environmental protection,” Putin’s business envoy in U.S. negotiations, Kirill Dmitriev, recently said on X.

At the Arctic Forum in Murmansk last week, Dmitriev announced that Russia would set up a special investment fund for Arctic development by year’s end that would attract funds from partners in the Persian Gulf as well as “a number of Western countries.” Dmitriev also said the United States showed “interest” in investing in the Russian Arctic region, including in LNG projects.

For Trump, expansion in the Arctic can be a way to resell cheap energy or buy minerals and rare earth metals from Russia, experts said. Cooperation with Russia would also be a way to stave off the growing interest of China, which has declared itself “a near-Arctic state,” and is building its own icebreaking fleet to explore the emerging trade routes.

For Russia, this presents an opportunity to access the LNG technologies it lacks and revive some of its key revenue makers, which have been hindered by sanctions since the invasion of Ukraine.

“When it comes to Arctic, Russia has a lot to offer,” said Russian economist and Arctic expert Vladislav Inozemtsev. “It is also something Russia cannot fully develop on its own.”

All about the gas

A warming climate has unlocked economic opportunities along the Northern Sea Route, a faster trade lane between Europe and Asia that was once frozen, and Russia aims to capitalize on this with its unrivaled icebreaker fleet.

These Arctic regions are rich in massive deposits of natural gas, with the Bovanenkovo field on the Yamal Peninsula alone holding approximately 4.9 trillion cubic meters of gas reserves, rivaling major U.S. fields such as Eagle Ford Shale. Russia had invested millions in LNG facilities along the northern route — until Western sanctions derailed those plans.

In 2019, Russia aimed for 30 percent to 40 percent control of the global LNG market and hoped to boost production to 70 million tons by 2030.

But Russia’s LNG industry is heavily reliant on Western technology and equipment, and it was crippled by the post-invasion sanctions. By 2024, Russia still had only an 8 percent market share.

Echoing Witkoff’s idea, Inozemtsev suggested that Trump could strike a deal with Russia by letting the United States have a stake in developing the LNG projects in Russia and then giving them a share of gas to resell to third countries.

One possible arrangement could see the United States acting as an intermediary for Russian gas sales to Europe, which after the Ukraine invasion largely weaned itself off Russian gas.

In this scenario, Inozemtsev said, Trump could push Europe to restart Russian pipeline gas imports, while Moscow, in return, would compensate the United States with a share of the Arctic liquefied gas that it could then ship to other countries at a higher profit margin.

“Russia has lucrative things to offer to the U.S., should the U.S., in turn, put pressure on Europe,” Inozemtsev said. The United States could fulfill its gas contracts to Europe by selling them reflagged Russian gas from the pipeline network and then sell its own LNG elsewhere.

There have also been reports of efforts to restart the Nord Stream pipeline which once brought gas across the Baltic Sea into Europe.

Pushing Europe to reopen sanctioned pipelines, however, is a hard sell after the continent’s painful breakup with Russian gas and oil after the invasion. German Economy Minister Robert Habeck dismissed the idea of reviving Nord Stream, calling it “completely the wrong direction,” following a recent Financial Times report about another possible effort. Similar resistance is likely across Europe, as many countries remain wary of rekindling ties with a supplier that has shown few qualms about using its resources for political ends.

In addition to gas, Russia’s Arctic is filled with rare-earth metals the Trump administration has publicly expressed interest in. At the forum, Dmitriev said the new fund plans to invest in development “with various partners.”

The Arctic is also rich in valuable minerals and metals such as lithium, nickel and aluminum, key resources for high-tech industries, renewable energy and defense.

“It’s a key thing it can offer beyond just energy extraction,” said Pavel Devyatkin, a Moscow-based senior fellow at the Arctic Institute, arguing that Moscow sees cooperation with the United States in the Arctic not from a purely economic standpoint but as a diplomatic tool to restore ties and global status with fewer geopolitical hurdles.

“The big thing here is the narrative of Arctic exceptionalism,” he said, referring to a policy first proposed by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that suggested the region should be exempt from geopolitical tensions, “where cooperation can happen despite conflicts.”

“Working together in the Arctic is still important for Russia’s great power status,” he said.

There is also a theory in the U.S. administration that engaging with Russia, such as in the Arctic, could help it disengage from China, a goal recently put forward by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Last year, the Pentagon highlighted in an updated Arctic Strategy the threat posed by Russia and China joining up in the region. In recent years, the United States expanded its military readiness in the Arctic in response to Moscow and Beijing’s “growing alignment” in economic and military cooperation, as the two states held joint military drills in the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska.

A recent analysis by Rand noted that Moscow has grown increasingly reliant on Beijing to finance its Arctic projects.

“We could find ourselves in a situation where, whether Russia wants to improve its relations with the U.S. or not, they can’t because they’ve become completely dependent on the Chinese because we have cut them off,” Rubio told conservative outlet Breitbart News on Feb. 25.

While Russia recognizes the imbalance in its relations with China and is working to expand ties with other powers to offset this, it would be difficult to fully cleave Russia from China, said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Eurasia Center.

“At present, the West in general and Washington in particular cannot offer Moscow anything so attractive that the Kremlin would agree to disengage from Beijing,” he said.

Treacherous waters

While Russia likes to promote the Northern Sea Route as a shorter alternative to the Suez Canal, the passage can be treacherous. For the largest container ships, many parts of the journey can be too shallow and the scarcity of ports is an added danger.

Likewise, the journey for American companies into Russian commercial space can be risky from a regulatory standpoint.

The legal terms of any joint U.S.-Russia enterprises are murky. Moscow has a list of “unfriendly countries” that essentially act as a tool of reciprocal sanctions. Putin would have to exclude the United States from the list.

Russia, scorched by the quick exodus of Western companies in the first weeks of the Ukraine war, signaled that any companies allowed back in would face new regulations and strictures to keep such an exit from happening again.

“Now we will demand investments not just in papers but in the land,” a senior Kremlin official said on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter more freely. “We will demand a situation that will prevent them further from taking a decision and leaving everything overnight.”

Before the war in Ukraine, a handful of foreign companies were involved in Russia’s Arctic energy sector, though sanctions and geopolitical tensions often restricted their footprint.

The Shtokman gas field was once planned as a major LNG export hub, led by Gazprom, French Total and Norwegian Equinor. The project stalled because of high costs and technological challenges. Western sanctions after the 2014 Crimea annexation further doomed it, and it was officially shelved.

ExxonMobil was the most significant U.S. player, teaming up with Rosneft in such major projects as the Sakhalin-1 oil and gas development.

Other American firms, including Halliburton, SLB, and Baker Hughes, played supporting roles, providing technology, equipment and oil field services to Russian energy giants.

After rounds of sanctions, American energy firms had little choice but to pack up and sever ties with one of the world’s most resource-rich but politically volatile nations.

This legacy now raises questions about whether the Trump-Putin rapprochement would be enough to persuade U.S. companies to risk operating in the market with high interest rates, increasing inflation and a rule of law that often exists only in theory.

Natalya Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, and Francesca Ebel in Moscow contributed to this report. Map by Laris Karklis.

Map sources: Gas production data via Global Oil and Gas Extraction Tracker, Global Energy Monitor, February 2025 release. Gas pipeline data via Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker, Global Energy Monitor, December 2024 release. 2024 Northern Sea Route data via Centre for High North Logistics. Discoverable gas via U.S. Geological Survey Oil and Gas Resource Assessment of the Russian Arctic, U.S. Energy Information Administration 2024 report on Russia and sea ice concentration data via University of Bremen.

Mary Ilyushina, a reporter on the Foreign Desk of The Washington Post, covers Russia and the region. She began her career in independent Russian media before joining CNN’s Moscow bureau as a field producer in 2017. She has been with The Post since 2021. She speaks Russian, English, Ukrainian and Arabic.