The Northern Sea Route tracks Russia’s Arctic coastline from the Barents Sea in the west to the Bering Strait in the east. The reason for this gap may well lie in the two countries’ different approaches to climate change. Putin’s attitude is that people can’t do much to stop climate change, and that makes adapting to it a long game. But for Putin, the Northern Sea Route is a bigger priority — and one of the few things it can offer China in the anti-U.S. alliance he’s trying to build with President Xi Jinping. So far, racing to assert Russian power in the Arctic before climate change makes competition there a free-for-all appears to have worked for the Kremlin.

Source: National Post May 28, 2019 13:02 UTC