Arctic Foreign Media Scan (March 24th – April 16th, 2025)

By: Bogdan Koutsenko

Key Takeaways 

• The media scan included 111 articles from three Russian media outlets including TASS, RT, and Sputnik International.
• Of the 26 thematic subcategories, “marine transportation” saw by far the greatest coverage. This was primarily due to TASS’s reporting on discussions of the Northern Sea Route at the March 26-27 Arctic Forum. The Northern Sea Route and its abbreviation, the NSR, were mentioned 1575 times across all articles, compared to a total of 1808 mentions for all search terms within the “marine transportation” subcategory.
• Trump’s commitment to annex Greenland has created opportunities for the Kremlin to justify its own imperial projects. Sergey Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, has argued that Ukraine is more important to Russian national security than Greenland is to that of the US.
• Cooperation with India continues to feature as a component of Russian foreign policy in the Arctic.
• Smaller Arctic nations like Finland, Sweden, and Canada are portrayed as reactionary and “Russophobic” in their reportedly unfounded suspicion towards Russian activities in the region.