Melting ice is opening routes and resources, but Russia already holds the strongest hand. The problem for Brussels is that whoever controls the Arctic in the next twenty years controls a shortcut between Asia and Europe, a stockpile of oil, gas and rare earths, and the northern approach to two nuclear powers. And right now, that whoever is shaping up to be Russia, China or an American president who has openly said he wants a slice of Greenland for himself. The EU, by contrast, turns up to this fight armed with its famous rulebook and some infrastructure cash. Against warships, icebreakers and a man who thinks Denmark "cannot protect" its own territory, that rulebook is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. That is the background to the European Arctic Summit that has just ended in Rovaniemi, the Finnish town that markets itself worldwide as Santa Claus's home address. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo gathered EU leaders and top Brussels officials there on September 13 and 14 to steer a new Arctic strategy before the European Commission publishes it, expected this autumn. Germany's Friedrich Merz set the mood: "High north – and low attention – is over." The leaders' joint statement declares the European Arctic "an integral part of the European Union," pointedly noting the bloc shares "a long external EU border with Russia" up there. It names Russia as posing a "significant and long-term threat" to Euro-Atlantic security, flags Moscow's "hybrid activities" as a growing worry, and welcomes the €200m Greenland package Brussels announced earlier this month. It calls for more spending on military mobility, cross-border transport links and satellite technology, and for closer coordination with NATO. Why the ice cracked open What is behind all of this is melting ice. The Arctic is warming three to four times faster than the rest of the planet, and last winter's sea ice peaked at 14.29 million square kilometers, statistically tied with the previous winter for the lowest maximum since satellites started measuring it in 1979. This unlocks more geopolitical goodies than will fit on Santa's sleigh. In October last year the Chinese-operated container ship Istanbul Bridge sailed the Northern Sea Route from China to Europe in around 20 days, roughly half the time of the traditional Suez Canal crossing. Russia's Rosatom logged 37.9 million tonnes of cargo along that route in 2024, a record. Under the retreating ice sits an estimated 13% of the world's undiscovered oil and 30% of its undiscovered gas. Greenland alone is thought to hold 1.5 million tonnes of rare earth reserves, the eighth-largest stockpile on Earth. Three powers, one shrinking buffer Russia holds the strongest hand by far. It runs the world's biggest icebreaker fleet, has reopened and modernized Soviet-era bases across the Kola Peninsula, and effectively polices the Northern Sea Route, demanding advance notice, Russian pilots and icebreaker escorts from anyone who wants to use it. China has no Arctic coastline, yet it wants in regardless. Its coast guard has already run joint Arctic patrols with Russia's, and since last summer it has been the sole buyer for the sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project, the giant Russian gas export project on the Yamal Peninsula, run by the Kremlin-linked energy firm Novatek and blacklisted by US sanctions since 2023. Cut off from Western shipping and technology, the project has still hit record output of more than 27 million cubic meters of gas a day through July and August this year. The gas is shipped out by a shadow fleet – ageing tankers bought up through shell companies to dodge the sanctions – that has swollen from 11 vessels in December to at least 20 now. Then there's the United States. In July, at a NATO summit in Ankara, Donald Trump told reporters: "We took Greenland and then stupidly we gave it back. We shouldn't have given it back to them because we're the ones that need it." That followed earlier moves. In October 2025 the US signed a $6.1b deal with Finland for new icebreakers, and before that, American officials lobbied hard enough to see the owner of Tanbreez, Greenland's largest rare-earth deposit, sell it to a US-listed firm rather than a Chinese-linked rival. What Brussels actually brought to the table With all of this, it would be easy for Europe to get squeezed out of its own backyard entirely. The EU does have a response. Its Rovaniemi wishlist reads like an ambitious shopping trip: jointly owned icebreakers, satellite launch capacity, military mobility funding, protected undersea cables, guaranteed access to critical minerals. Orpo wants Finland, whose yards design roughly 80% of the world's icebreakers, to build all of them. Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign policy chief, backed the idea in principle at the summit but was careful to add that ordinary procurement rules would still apply and contracts would go to the strongest bid. Money is the EU's real weapon. It has already handed Greenland a €200m Global Gateway package. Global Gateway is Brussels' flagship scheme for funding infrastructure abroad, normally used to compete with China's Belt and Road Initiative in Africa and Asia, and it is now being redirected to shore up a territory inside the EU's own neighborhood. Council President António Costa has promised more cash in the next long-term budget, calling the region "no longer just a local matter, but an issue for all of Europe." The EU's latest sanctions package, adopted in July, now requires EU sellers of LNG tankers to notify the authorities of any sale outside the bloc. It also opens the door to a ban on sales to Russia and to safeguards against resale to Moscow. Where the rulebook runs out Brussels has form for letting its own rules cost it a seat at the table. Back in 2013 the Arctic Council admitted China, Japan and India as observers, and parked the EU's own application because of a row over its ban on seal products. Thirteen years on, the EU still hasn't won formal observer status in the club whose future it now wants to shape. The sanctions bite slowly too. EU countries still imported 91 cargoes of Russian LNG from the Yamal project between January and April this year. That was 17.2% more by volume than in the same period the year before, and Belgium's Zeebrugge terminal took the largest single share. And the EU has no soldiers to send north. Worse, most of the non-Russian Arctic doesn't even want to join the club. Norway has voted no to membership twice. Greenland walked out of the European Community in 1985 over fishing rights, and on 29 August, Iceland voted 52.84% to reject even reopening accession talks. Most awkward of all, that joint statement names Russia as a long-term threat and flags China's growing security interest in the region, but never once mentions the United States, the ally whose own president covets a member state's territory.
