For more than two decades, a pair of imposing granite lions flanked the entrance to a rust-red building deep inside the Arctic Circle. Not anymore. Last month they disappeared, and their absence tells a story about the increasingly tense geopolitics at the top of the world.
The vanished lions once guarded a research station operated by China in the Ny-Ålesund settlement on Svalbard, an archipelago nestled between mainland Norway and the North Pole. In May, they were removed by the Norwegian state-owned company that operates the settlement; in June it took down a sign on the building that had read “Yellow River Station.”
Norway’s move is being seen by some experts as part of attempts to reinforce its sovereignty over this slice of the Arctic in the face of seismic geopolitical and climate change shifts.
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Greenland may dominate Arctic concerns, as President Donald Trump repeatedly tries to claim it for the United States citing the need counter growing influence from Beijing and Moscow, but another potentially explosive tussle is playing out on Svalbard — where China and Russia already have a presence.
And some fear the world isn’t paying enough attention.
Svalbard is a unique cluster of islands. It has only around 3,000 residents, but no native population and women cannot give birth there. It’s home to the world’s northernmost permanently inhabited town, Longyearbyen, and is the fastest-warming place on the planet, heating up at around six to seven times the global average.
A century-old treaty gives Norway full sovereignty, but it also allows people from nearly 50 signatory countries, including China and Russia, to live and work on Svalbard visa-free.
Over the past decades it’s become the planet’s leading hub of Arctic science, and a rare site of international cooperation. “People from all over the world with huge, huge cultural differences… come together to collaborate,” said Hedda Andersen, a glaciologist working at Ny-Ålesund Research Station.
But this harmony is eroding as Svalbard’s unique set-up collides with increasingly fractured international relations and countries’ quest for influence in the fast-warming Arctic.
“You’re seeing the broader geopolitical context spilling over on the territory in a way that it hasn’t in previous decades,” said Otto Svendsen, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Svalbard’s geography is a big part of what makes it so attractive. Its ocean boasts rich fishing grounds and critical seabed minerals. It’s in a prime location for controlling and downloading data from the polar orbiting satellites used for science, weather forecasting and defense.
It also sits close to Russia’s Kola Peninsula, one of the country’s most strategically important military regions, where much of its sea-based nuclear arsenal is located.
The archipelago is easy to reach. Regular flights from mainland Norway allow people to access the high Arctic in matter of hours. Dozens of countries have a presence on Svalbard, including Russia, China, the UK, Italy, Japan and Poland. Their research stations provide a gateway to Arctic influence, “almost like a geopolitical currency,” said Serafima Andreeva, a research associate at The Arctic Institute, a think tank.
For decades, the slogan in the region was “High North; low tension,” said Eivind Vad Petersson, state secretary in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but “that’s no longer a precise description of realities.”
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 made a huge dent in the idea the Arctic was immune to geopolitical headwinds and threw a spotlight on the dissonance of Russia having a settlement on NATO territory.
Barentsburg, a mining and research outpost on Svalbard, is inhabited almost completely by Russians and is watched over by a huge bust of Vladimir Lenin.
Russian actions on Svalbard have further inflamed tensions. In 2023, it held a military-style parade in Barentsburg, complete with a convoy of trucks and snowmobiles bearing Russian flags and a low-flying helicopter, for which Russia was fined by the Norwegian aviation authority.
Last year, Russian lawmaker Sergey Mironov suggested Svalbard should be renamed the Pomor Islands, in reference to a group of Russian hunters and trappers present on the archipelago centuries ago.
Russia has also invoked the same kind of language it uses to justify its actions in Ukraine, arguing it needs to protect Russian speakers on Svalbard, CSIS’s Svendsen said. And it has repeatedly accused Norway of trying to militarize the islands.
Nikolay Korchunov, Russia’s Ambassador in Norway, said Norway “blurs the boundaries” of the Svalbard Treaty stipulation that the islands not be used for “warlike purposes.” Russia has never called into question Norway’s sovereignty, Korchunov added, but is instead “trying to bring clarity” to how it exercises this sovereignty.
Norway’s State Secretary Petersson rejected militarization claims, telling CNN the Svalbard Treaty prevents the establishment of a NATO base on the islands or using them for war-like purposes, but that’s “much narrower and something very different from being a demilitarized zone.”
“Svalbard is part of Norway; Svalbard is part of NATO; Svalbard is part of Norwegian defense plans,” he said.
Few believe Russia is charting a path toward direct military action. It already has almost everything it wants on Svalbard and is stretched in Ukraine, said Andreas Østhagen, a senior researcher at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo.
Instead, Russia appears to want to use Svalbard as a place “to show that they will not be pushed back by Norway, or by NATO at large,” he said.
But it’s not just Russia’s actions on Svalbard that have been raising concerns. There’s also China.
Unlike Russia, China is not an Arctic power, but it has ambitions. In its 2018 Arctic strategy paper it called itself a “near-Arctic state” and repeatedly referred to Svalbard. It also has plans for a “polar silk road,” an infrastructure and shipping corridor across the top of the world.
In 2024, as China celebrated the 20th anniversary of its Ny-Ålesund research station, a Chinese travel company brought more than 100 tourists to Svalbard. Some waved flags; one wore a camo outfit bearing what appeared to be a Chinese military emblem.
The event raised alarm in Norway, where concerns have been growing about what China wants on Svalbard. There have been “warnings from the police security service and the military intelligence service about Chinese intentions,” Østhagen said.
A spokesperson for China’s Embassy in Norway said it participates in Arctic affairs “in accordance with international law” and its intentions in the region are “to safeguard the common interests of all countries.”
There’s another important character in the rippling tensions: human-driven climate change.
In the summer of 2024, Svalbard shattered previous ice melt records, losing more than 60 gigatons of ice, around 1% of its total, as temperatures spiked 7 degrees Fahrenheit above average. Four of the past five years have set new records for ice loss.
Climate change is “in many ways what is driving a lot of the general interest towards the Arctic,” Østhagen said. There’s a narrative that melting ice will open up economic and strategic opportunities.
The reality is more complicated; people have anticipated a flow of ships across the Arctic Ocean and a rush of oil, gas and minerals from beneath its frigid waters for decades — but it has yet to happen. The region remains harsh and inhospitable.
Whether or not melting ice ultimately opens up the region “doesn’t matter,” said Torbjørn Pedersen, a professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Nord University. Countries’ “fear of missing out” is pushing them to be present in the Arctic and exert political influence, he added.
And as they do, Norway appears to be tightening its grip on Svalbard.
In 2022, the government changed voting rules to prevent non-Norwegians from voting in Longyearbyen’s elections, unless they had lived in mainland Norway for three years. “This was part of necessary clarification; Svalbard is not an international zone,” state secretary Petersson said.
Norway has also made clear its ambition to mine a huge stretch of Arctic seabed around Svalbard and beyond for critical minerals. The plan has been opposed by Russia — “we would like to remind the Norwegian side once again that it does not exercise unconditional sovereignty” over Svalbard, Russian officials said in a 2023 briefing.
Then came the removal of China’s lions along with national symbols at other countries’ buildings across Ny-Ålesund. “There is no Chinese research station on Svalbard,” Petersson said. “There’s a Norwegian research station with Chinese tenants,” he said. “That’s a distinction with a difference.”
For now, Norway is confident it will be able to “maintain a certain level of stability in this region,” Petersson said.
But the world is changing fast. As Trump repeats his assertions the US should own Greenland, the NATO alliance comes under increasing pressure and countries increasingly look to position themselves as strong Arctic powers in a rapidly-shifting region, the future appears less and less certain.
Countries may start thinking “what matters now is power and your ability to assert the power,” Østhagen said, “and not necessarily the norms and laws that we’ve set up over the last century.”
CNN’s Julian Quinones contributed to this report
