According to Korchunov, the online newspaper MilitaryTimes.com published last January that the US military was “preparing for a military confrontation in the Arctic, where waterways will become more navigable as the ice melts.”
The Russian diplomat called this narrative “worrying because it is about the military exploitation of the region, which worries us because there are no problems in the Arctic that require a solution using weapons.”
He recalled that the council consists of eight members defined as Arctic nations: Canada, Denmark, the United States, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden.
Another 13 non-Arctic countries (China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, South Korea, Singapore, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) belong to the regional body as observers.
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