I welcome the document’s strength and robustness with regards to Russia’s threat elsewhere than Ukraine but, following my quick reading, I am a little disappointed by how little it says about the Arctic. More than half of Russia’s navy and all its nuclear defence is in the Arctic, on which it has a 25,000-mile coastline, and most of Russia’s economic wealth also comes from the Arctic, yet only one paragraph is devoted to it. Frankly, I think the threat is quite substantial, so I am disappointed by the oft-repeated hope
“for the Arctic to return to being a region of high cooperation and low tension.”
Am I right in thinking that is more of a hope than a belief that it will actually happen?