NATO allies wake up to Russian supremacy in the Arctic

The world's largest satellite ground station, on the Svalbard archipelago off Norway, is used by Western space agencies to gather vital signals from polar-orbiting satellites. This January, one of two fibre-optic cables on the Arctic seabed connecting Svalbard to the mainland was severed. Norway was forced to rely on a back-up link.

In April 2021, another cable – one used by a Norwegian research laboratory to monitor activity on the Arctic seafloor – was ripped away.

"This could have happened by accident," Norway's defence chief Eirik Kristoffersen told Reuters in...