The Arctic in Transition: How the Russo-Ukrainian War Challenged Exceptionalism and Reshaped Regional Governance and Security

Abstract

Long perceived as a zone of pragmatic Russia-West cooperation, the Arctic
has increasingly become entangled in the broader dynamics of geopolitical rivalry following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. This rupture has profoundly unsettled the region’s delicate balance, leading to the suspension of the Arctic Council’s activities and the interruption of long-standing diplomatic and scientific engagements. Concurrently, the ac-cession of Finland and Sweden to NATO has reshaped the regional security architecture, further marginalizing Russia and accelerating an ongoing pro-cess of militarization. The conflict has also amplified hybrid threats and ex-panded the strategic ambitions of non-Arctic actors – most notably China – introducing new sources of volatility into an already complex environment.
Against this backdrop, this article contends that the Arctic constitutes not merely a region affected by the war, but a critical observatory for assess-ing the resilience of institutional cooperation under conditions of systemic fragmentation. It analyzes how the deterioration of trust, the instrumen-talization of science, and the securitization of governance are transforming the Arctic’s geopolitical configuration. More broadly, it explores whether pragmatic forms of engagement can be preserved in an era marked by po-larization, deterrence logics, and the blurring of civil-military boundaries. As such, the Arctic emerges as a revealing microcosm of the shifting inter-national order – and a testbed for the future of multilateralism.