The noise is difficult to bear: on the tarmac at Bodo airport, in Norway, on the border of the Arctic Circle, dozens of Norwegian, German, French or American fighter planes are waiting, engines on, the green light for to take off. In a thunder of post-combustion, they soar two by two under the dumbfounded eyes of the passengers of the small airliner which quietly awaits its turn at the edge of the runway.
In June 2019, the Arctic Challenge air exercise is in full swing: it brings together hundreds of aircraft from NATO member or partner countries, which simulate massive air raids in the region. Every day, the aviators soar over Norway, Sweden and Finland, the three organizing countries, and simulate fights between the blue team, the allies, and the red team, the intruders.
On board the French Awacs radar plane, a jewel of electronics in which we had the rare privilege to board, the screens everywhere show clusters of red plots, facing blue plots ready to emerge to intercept them. “Avalanche! », Launches a young operator of aerial surveillance, to report a massive attack. “Golf yankee 315, Super Flanker sniff,” calmly replies an electronic surveillance operator, signaling that one of the enemy aircraft is a Sukhoi-35 Super Flanker. A pair of German Eurofighter rushes to intercept them.
A scent of the Cold War
The exercise smacks of the Cold War: the reds are credited with the characteristics of the Russian Sukhoi and Mig planes, even though they are in reality embodied by good old American F-15s, by Swedish Gripens or by one of the fourteen Rafale and Mirage 2000 dispatched by the Air Force. Like almost all military exercises organized in the region, Arctic Challenge imagines a confrontation between Russians and Westerners, which has once again become plausible since the 2014 invasion of Crimea by Vladimir Putin.
In 2018, the NATO exercise Trident Juncture, the largest for ten years for the Atlantic Alliance, brought together in Norway and Iceland more than 45,000 soldiers from 31 countries, in a “collective defense scenario”. On the Russian side, the Zapad (“West”) exercise in 2017 brought together 40,000 to 70,000 soldiers, while the Vostok (“East”) exercise in 2018, the largest in the country’s history with 300,000 soldiers, 36,000 armored vehicles, a thousand aircraft and 80 ships also included a significant Arctic component.
“A Russian quasi-monopoly”
But apart from these exercises, the forces involved are limited. “The Arctic is a Russian quasi-monopoly”, confides an official French source. And for good reason: the extreme conditions are a major obstacle for those who venture there, and it is not enough to have money and snap your fingers to throw paratroopers or set up a base there.
“Only the Russians are operational throughout the area: they can now deploy anywhere in the Arctic in 48 to 72 hours, and they are aiming for 24 hours by 2030”, explains Mikaa Mered , teacher at Sciences Po Paris and at the War School and author of The polar worlds (PUF, 2019).
77 Russian icebreakers
The expert Arctic researcher underlines the Russians’ exceptional state of preparedness: “It is less cold in the North Pole than in parts of mainland Siberia!” If you test your troops and your equipment in Siberia by – 70 or – 75 °, you can largely operate by – 30 or – 40 ° at the North Pole ”. A French officer familiar with special operations confirms: “The Russians recently succeeded in parachuting an entire brigade by – 30 ° on the ground”: a feat today beyond the reach of other armies in the world.
And that’s not even the main asset of the Russians! With 77 operational public and private icebreakers, including six nuclear powered, they can navigate freely in the region. They will pass the bar of one hundred icebreakers in 2030, in particular with the new Arktika class, capable of piercing three meters of ice and whose first series, eponymous, has just entered service.
Russia’s “balcony”
If they see the light of day, the future Leader class behemoths, twice as powerful still, will end up establishing the domination of the country. At the same time, the Kremlin is funding a project for a floating scientific platform in the Arctic Ocean, which would foreshadow a model of a military “hub” projected at sea at low cost. For one hundred million euros per unit, or eight times less than a large icebreaker, these forward bases could accommodate helicopters. Enough to defend the region, which they “consider their balcony”, we slip into the office of the Minister of the Armed Forces, Florence Parly.
“Officially, the Russians fear American action via the poles, but it is they who have the most capacity for action”, comments a French source, while recalling that “part of the Russian nuclear deterrence is installed in this arctic zone, therefore crucial for them ”, referring to the nuclear submarine base in Murmansk, near the border with Norway and Finland.
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