Russia dusts off old plans to open the Northeast Passage for sea trade with Asia

Jonathan Manthorpe in the Vancouver Sun (Canada): The plague of pirates preying on Asia's sea links to Europe and the prospects of opportunities presented by global warming have prompted Russia to dust off some old plans that have been lying in filing cabinets since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The shortest route by some 3,000 nautical miles between the throbbing workshops of the Far East and Southeast Asia and the hypermarkets of Europe is not the current course through the traffic jams of the Malacca Straits and the high-risk transit past the Horn of Africa to the Suez Canal.

It is what the Russians call the Northern Sea Route and what those with a British-centric view of global maritime exploration are more likely to still call the Northeast Passage. This route runs from the Barents Sea north of Norway and the Russian port of Murmansk -- a city, incidentally, attacked and burned by a Royal Navy captain ancestor of this writer during the Crimean War -- along the Arctic coast of Siberia and down through the Bering Strait to Asia.

This route was used extensively during the Soviet period with the help of nuclear-powered icebreakers, because parts of the sea are only ice-free for two months a year in late summer. Use of the northern route dwindled to nothing after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the two decades of internal turmoil needed to reimpose political stability and nationwide economic growth. The reawakening of Russia's Arctic consciousness came with the construction and opening in 2008 of an extraordinary oil terminal 22 kilometres offshore at Varandey in the eastern Barents Sea….

North of the western Russian mainland lies the island archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. The archipelago is situated in the Arctic Ocean, between the Barents Sea to the west and the Kara Sea to the east. Satellite image from NASA