The Russians Are Dropping From the Skies, Arctic Gets Colder

Russian plans to drop paratroops onto sea ice at the North Pole sparked a firm warning yesterday from Ottawa, leading to accusations that both countries are posturing for domestic audiences.

...Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who was asked about the plan after an unrelated announcement in Halifax, said Canada would be watching the Russians closely.

“Any country that is approaching Canadian airspace, Canadian territory, will be met by Canadians,” he said yesterday. “We're going to protect our sovereign territory and we're always to meet any challenge to that territorial sovereignty.”

Arctic experts stressed, though, that there is nothing illegal under international law about what the Russians are planning.

“Canada has not claimed the North Pole,” said Whitney Lackenbauer, a history professor at the University of Waterloo. “Is he saying that the North Pole is sovereign territory?”

He said that Canada can make a claim for resource rights on the seabed, based on the extension of the country's continental shelf, but that would not secure ownership of the water column or the ice atop it.

Prof. Lackenbauer said he shakes his head at what he sees as increasingly heated rhetoric of “the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming.”

“We know in Canada this plays pretty well to a domestic audience, and of course it does in Russia as well.”

Canada has put hundreds of millions of dollars into a military training center in Resolute Bay, and to expand and re-equip the Canadian Rangers that patrol the Arctic.