Obsidian/00.03 News/Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic.md

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# Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic

It was polar winter, one long night. The lakes had frozen in the Far North, and the foxes and the grouse had shed their brown fur and feathers in favor of Arctic white. To survive the months of snow and ice, predators resort to camouflage and deception. But so do their prey.

This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

In the small town of Kirkenes—in the northeastern corner of Norway, six miles from the Russian border—the regional counterintelligence chief, Johan Roaldsnes, peered out his office window at the fjord below. There were eight Russian fishing trawlers docked outside, housing at least six hundred Russian sailors.

The phone rang. The caller was a government employee who worked at the local port. It was not uncommon for Russian trawlers to stop in Kirkenes, but some of these were not among the usual ships. One of them, a fish-processing vessel named Arka-33, had docked weeks earlier and hadn’t left.

“Seems a bit much,” the caller said.

“Might be,” Roaldsnes replied. Uncertainty was his profession.

He walked out of his office, into the cold, and past the church from which the town had taken its name: Kirkenes, “church on the promontory.” There were two clocks on the spire. They showed different times, neither of which was correct.

It was late December, 2022, almost a year since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Roaldsnes had not seen the sun in a month; it wouldn’t rise again for another. Locals call these months the *mørketid*—the dark time. Most of the time, you can’t see what’s around you, even if you know that it’s there.

Arka-33 was larger than many buildings in town. Before docking, its captain had given only the required twenty-four hours’ notice to Norwegian port authorities. The ship belongs to a Russian crab-fishing company whose C.E.O., according to the OpenSanctions database, used to run at least two private security companies. His wife—who was previously listed as C.E.O.—is a member of the Russian parliament and appears on various sanctions lists. As Roaldsnes drove through the dock yard, he noted that Arka-33 was moored in a position that is used by the Norwegian military’s primary electronic-intelligence-collection vessel when it stops in Kirkenes.

“What’s the new threat that we don’t see?” Johan Roaldsnes, the head of counterintelligence for the region, asked.

A fishing boat was no longer just a fishing boat, in the eyes of Norwegian authorities. That summer, the Russian government had declared that commercial vessels could be co-opted by the military for any purpose. The fjords of Kirkenes open up to the Barents Sea, just a few miles from where the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet has engaged in espionage and nuclear-war preparations since the earliest days of the Cold War. Locals in Kirkenes, a town of thirty-five hundred people, noticed that Russian fishermen were younger than those who had come before the war in Ukraine, and that they sometimes did physical-training exercises on the decks of their ships.

Russian sailors carry handwritten seafarer passports. “You don’t actually *know* who is on board,” Roaldsnes told me. “If you do a deep dive on a bunch of sailors, you will eventually find somebody linked to the Northern Fleet.”

Recently, crew on a vessel that had been associated with the destruction of subsea communications cables had steered a motorboat into restricted waters near a Norwegian Army garrison. Were they testing their equipment, or the speed of the Norwegian response? A search of two trawlers had revealed radios that could tune into military frequencies which are used by the Northern Fleet. I asked Roaldsnes whether the trawlers were effectively functioning as intelligence vessels. “No, they’re fishing vessels,” he said. “Well . . .” He winced, and rephrased his assessment: “They fish.”

For the past few years, civilian life in northern Norway has been under constant, low-grade attack. Russian hackers have targeted small municipalities and ports with phishing scams, ransomware, and other forms of cyber warfare, and individuals travelling as tourists have been caught photographing sensitive defense and communications infrastructure. Norway’s domestic-intelligence service, the P.S.T., has warned of the threat of sabotage to Norwegian train lines, and to gas facilities that supply energy to much of Europe. A few months ago, someone cut a vital communications cable running to a Norwegian Air Force base. “We’ve seen what we believe to be continuous mapping of our critical infrastructure,” Roaldsnes told me. “I see it as continuous war preparation.”

The aberrant trawlers left as quietly as they had come. Roaldsnes had spent Christmas privately agonizing over the possibility that there was a special-forces unit scattered among the ships. Was this a dry run for a potential attack? Or was the threat mostly imaginary—a “wilderness of mirrors,” as a former C.I.A. counterintelligence chief once described such things?

After a decade in the P.S.T., Roaldsnes considered it professionally important to never fully make up his mind. Counterintelligence, he later told me, “is like playing tennis without seeing your opponent or whether it’s actually a ball being served to you. It might behave as a ball. But, when you get close, it’s an orange.”

Most Western governments do not appear to think of themselves as being at war with Russia. Russia, however, is at war with the West. “That’s for sure—we are saying that openly,” the Russian representative to the United Nations recently declared. Most attacks are deliberately murky, and difficult to attribute. They are acts of so-called hybrid warfare, designed to subdue the enemy without fighting. The strategy appears to be to push the limits of what Russia can get away with—to subvert, to sabotage, to hack, to destabilize, to instill fear—and to paralyze Western governments by hinting at even more aggressive tactics. “They do it because they can do it,” an air-traffic controller told me, of an electronic-warfare attack that imperils civilian aviation. “Then they deny everything, and they threaten you, saying that, if you don’t stop accusing them of what you know they’re doing, bad things will happen to you.”

Ever since Russia annexed Crimea, in 2014, its military and intelligence services have been experimenting with hybrid warfare and influence operations in Kirkenes, treating the area as “a laboratory,” as the regional police chief put it to me. Some attacks were almost imperceptible at first; others disrupted everyday life and caused division among locals. To understand what was happening in her district, she started reading Sun Tzu.

Then, in early 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The conversations inside Roaldsnes’s office, in Kirkenes, took on an existential tone, because Vladimir Putin has shown himself to be willing to risk it all over relatively small, strategically important areas. The Article 5 policy of collective defense states that an attack on one *NATO* member is an attack on all. But would the United States engage in thermonuclear war over a sparsely populated swath of Arctic Norway?

Countries throughout Europe now acknowledge that their people and infrastructure are under ceaseless attack. Yet each incident is, by itself, below the threshold that would require a military response or trigger Article 5. In recent months, agents of Russian intelligence are believed to have assassinated a defector in Spain, planted explosives near a pipeline in Germany, carried out arson attacks all over the Continent, and sabotaged subsea cables and rail lines. A Russian operative injured himself in Paris while preparing explosives for a terrorist attack on a hardware store, and U.S. intelligence discovered a Russian plot to assassinate the C.E.O. of one of Europe’s largest arms manufacturers. Poland’s interior minister said, “We are facing a foreign state that is conducting hostile and—in military parlance—kinetic action on Polish territory.” Every European country that borders Russia is preparing for a wider war in the event of a Russian victory in Ukraine. Poland and the Baltics are digging trenches at their borders and fortifying them, often with antitank obstacles known as “dragon’s teeth.” Finland cast aside seventy years of neutrality and nonalignment to join *NATO*; Sweden cast aside two hundred.

A Norwegian outpost that overlooks the border with Russia.

Russia’s low-grade attacks are accompanied by threats of nuclear annihilation, both by Kremlin officials and by pundits on state television. In May, the Russian military carried out an exercise in which it practiced initiating a tactical nuclear war. In the context of nuclear escalation, Kirkenes is in one of the most strategically sensitive regions on earth. The other side of the border is the Kola Peninsula, which is filled with closed military towns and airfields, nuclear-weapons storage facilities, and nuclear-submarine ports. “Within a radius of, let’s say, two hundred kilometres of this table, there could be a thousand nuclear warheads,” Thomas Nilsen, a journalist in Kirkenes, told me, over a dinner of reindeer and arctic char. Russia is also using the Barents Sea for research and development of new delivery systems for nuclear weapons, including a subsea nuclear torpedo that could flood a coastal city with a radioactive tsunami, and a nuclear-powered cruise missile with global reach.

“The Kola Peninsula is their strategic security against the West,” Roaldsnes told me. “The whole Russian plan is that, if things really heat up with *NATO*, they need to create a buffer,” to preserve the capability to carry out nuclear strikes. “That means the ability to control their closest neighboring territory”—the region that includes Kirkenes—“and control access to the waters, to prevent anyone from getting close.” The goal is “the ability to deny access to the Barents Sea,” to protect the Northern Fleet.

But the control of territory is not only a matter of weapons systems. It’s also about people. And here, at the point of contact between *NATO* and Russia’s nuclear stronghold, it seems that the Kremlin is quietly waging a parallel battle for public sentiment in a small fishing town, geographically isolated from the rest of Norway and the West. As Sun Tzu writes, the path to victory is to win first, and then go to war.

In March, 2022, a few weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, I set off for northwestern Norway to attend a *NATO* military exercise called Cold Response, in which some thirty thousand troops were practicing Arctic warfare. The exercise involved a staged invasion of Norway, with the Nordic nations defending the area as soldiers from the U.S., Britain, France, and other *NATO* countries attempted an amphibious assault from the sea. Although no one officially acknowledged it, each country was practicing its likely role in the event of a Russian invasion—and sending a message about *NATO* unity. “What we are trying to do here is to make sure that there will never be a war in Norway,” one of the top commanders told me. “And the deterrence part of the operation is not really effective if we are the only ones who know it.”

![](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a60289)

“You had the power to leave all along—just click your heels three times, grab your coat, and sneak out without saying goodbye.”

Cartoon by Ali Solomon

The Russians were invited to send observers to the exercise, partly as a gesture of transparency. They declined, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. During the exercise, men with Eastern European accents reportedly tried to buy Norwegian military I.D.s from drunk conscripts at a bar. (During another *NATO* exercise, a “tourist” who had logged into his hotel’s Wi-Fi appeared to have been sent by the Russian security services to help in the deployment of a cyberattack.) The paucity of accommodations in remote Arctic towns makes them ripe for spontaneous encounters with high-value targets and their devices; once, as I was having a reindeer burger at a crowded hotel bar, the heads of both the Norwegian and the Swedish Armed Forces brushed past my chair.

One morning, a Norwegian Army spokesman led me through a few checkpoints to a tent, where Pål Berglund, the commander of Norway’s Northern Brigade, was changing his socks. For almost two weeks, he had been living in the back of an infantry vehicle, from which he was running the Norwegian defense. Berglund’s brigade is among the northernmost ground forces on earth. As such, his soldiers were also training allies to endure the challenges of Arctic conditions: cables freeze, lubricants harden, guns jam, vehicles get stuck in the snow. “If you do everything wrong and you’re in the jungle, you will still survive a week or so,” Berglund said. “But if you do everything wrong in the Arctic, it’s a matter of hours before you will freeze to death.”

At a gas station, I ran into the commander of the battalion that guards Norway’s border with Russia. He invited me to Kirkenes, and a few weeks later I travelled there for the first time. It was mid-April, and the air was well above freezing—unseasonably warm for two hundred and fifty miles north of the Arctic Circle. Rain pelted the windows on the bus from the airport into town. One of the company commanders, Fredrik Hodnefjell, arranged to take me on a patrol along the Pasvik River, which marks the border with Russia. He’d originally planned for us to travel on the river’s frozen surface, but it was no longer safe. The ice should have held for another couple of weeks. But the Arctic is warming four times faster than anywhere else on earth.

Hodnefjell picked me up in town, and we drove toward the river. A road sign in both Norwegian and Russian showed that we were heading in the direction of Murmansk, Russia, home to the Northern Fleet. About ten minutes into the drive, we climbed out of the car. Before us were two border posts, four metres apart: yellow and black on the Norwegian side; red and green, with a silver Russian coat of arms, on the other. In the distance, we could see the onion dome of a Russian Orthodox church.

The area was completely silent. There were no signs of people, no animal tracks in the snow. “We are being watched now,” Hodnefjell said.

“By the Russians?” I asked.

“By our own.”

Later that afternoon, we climbed onto a snowmobile and set out into the pine forest, to visit a watchtower that overlooks the Russian town of Nikel, named for the metal its residents once mined. Huge smelting towers burst through the tree line. Not long ago, their fumes polluted the air on both sides of the river, but now the mine is closed. We climbed the watchtower, where a small group of conscripts spends every hour of every day monitoring the border. One of them noted the strangeness of knowing so well what Nikel looks like without ever having been there.

Hodnefjell handed me a pair of binoculars and pointed out a collapsing concrete structure on the Russian side. Beneath it lay the site of the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a nine-inch-wide hole dug more than seven and a half miles down, in an attempt to breach the earth’s crust. The effort failed, but it represented one of the final superlatives of the Soviet Union: the deepest hole on earth.

Map by Francesco Muzzi

I returned to the region several times in the next two years, culminating in a three-month stay that encompassed the *mørketid*. My time in the Arctic coincided with almost constant military activity, by land, air, and sea. The Finns practiced taking off and landing fighter jets on remote roads, and planting explosives along the routes to Russia; the Norwegians trained Ukrainian special forces in unpopulated fjords. *NATO* held its first exercises with Sweden and Finland as member states, and the Americans docked nuclear-powered attack submarines in a Norwegian Arctic port. (Russian fishing trawlers, meanwhile, loitered in the port and reported “engine trouble,” as if looking for a pretext to get close to the submarines.)

To better understand the military preparations, I traversed roughly seventy kilometres of the border—mostly in snowshoes, occasionally in boots or on skis—and bunked with conscripts in remote outposts whose walls were coated in ice. The border region is a place where everyday life is imbued with geopolitical significance, where the stakes are visible in what little infrastructure exists amid the vast, unyielding wilderness: radar balls, listening stations, relay towers, a microwave-communications network for the military. On a patrol last November, to monitor the border in the mountains overlooking Russia’s Pechenga valley, two conscripts and I experienced total whiteout, and could hardly distinguish ground from sky. It was just freezing whiteness, minus twenty degrees Celsius—a void. Shortly after midday, everything faded to blue and gray, then to black.

The conscript in front of me, Jørgen Benningstad, led the way; the one behind me, Nikolai Thorsen, dragged supplies in a sled, and stopped every thirty minutes to call in our status and coördinates over an encrypted radio.

After nearly three hours, we arrived at an empty military cabin that had no water or electricity, only a small wood-burning stove. Benningstad and Thorsen took turns in a lookout room—perhaps four feet by six—which had a telescope pointed at Russia, about a hundred metres down the hill. There was a small table that held their radios and a night-vision monocular. But the weather made optical surveillance pointless, so Thorsen opened the window and started listening instead. “We can’t see anyone better than we would hear them,” he said. He stood, motionless, head out the window, neck craning, an ear toward the border line. The Arctic silence was so profound that we could hear the noise of a car’s tires several kilometres away, in Russia.

Thorsen and Benningstad swapped positions every fifteen minutes—ears freezing out the window or warming by the stove. After eight shifts, they put out the fire and packed up their survival packs, and we set off into the black. I never saw any Russians from the border line, except as specks in watchtowers. But each patrol amounts to an assertion of sovereignty, a form of signalling: *Look at me looking at you.*

Many of the world’s most closely guarded secrets concern the capacity of governments to destroy their enemies while denying them the ability to retaliate. Perhaps the most important of these are the precise locations of nuclear submarines. Russian submarines are designed for stealth, and carry as many as sixteen long-range ballistic missiles that can be launched underwater. The most advanced of these missiles weigh around eighty thousand pounds and carry several thermonuclear warheads, each of which can generate an explosion many times larger than that of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. A single “boomer,” as these submarines are called, can turn a nation into a radioactive wasteland. They are the Russian military’s ultimate investment and security blanket, and their protection is its ultimate priority.

Russia spans eleven time zones and has the longest Arctic Ocean coastline in the world. The Northern Fleet is the country’s primary nuclear deterrent, but its submarines are “prisoners of geography,” as the author Tim Marshall has put it. The fleet’s home base, in the Kola Peninsula, is within range of Norwegian signals-intelligence stations, but it can’t be moved farther east, because the Barents Sea is the only part of the Russian Arctic that has ice-free ports year-round. With each trip to the Atlantic, the submarines must traverse the shallow water of the Barents Sea, making them vulnerable to tracking by *NATO* forces.

Frode Berg, a former border inspector who was imprisoned in Russia.

Last June, I joined a U.S. Navy crew for a mission aboard a P-8 Poseidon, one of the world’s most advanced submarine-hunting aircraft. We took off from Iceland and flew northeast, toward the Kola Peninsula. A little more than two hours into the flight, the lead pilot, Sandeep Arakali—a twenty-eight-year-old aerospace engineer with two degrees from Stanford—peered out his cockpit window and spotted a U.S. Air Force stratotanker to our right. It was time for an air-to-air refuelling, to maximize the time spent on the mission. Both planes, flying at more than five hundred miles an hour, had arrived at these exact coördinates, over international waters, at the appointed minute.

Arakali approached the stratotanker from behind and from slightly below. The tanker filled the P-8’s cockpit windows—four huge jet engines, spanning my peripheral vision. Arakali leaned over the controls and craned his neck upward. His hands shook wildly, compensating for forces that I could not see; in relation to the stratotanker, the P-8 seemed perfectly still. A young woman, lying prone in the stratotanker’s tail, stared back at him, her face framed by a small triangular window, as she guided a fuel line into the top of the P-8. There was a rush of liquid above us—two tons per minute. Then the line detached, and Arakali descended over the Barents Sea.

To hunt submarines, P-8 crews generally fly at low altitude—sometimes below five hundred feet. The plane resembles a Boeing 737, but behind the cockpit there are only two large windows, for photographing warships, auxiliary vessels, and other objects of interest. The rest of the plane is a closed tube, filled with surveillance equipment and computer banks. Sonar buoys are dropped into the water below, creating a three-dimensional sound map of the underwater area—including any submarines passing through it—which is then shared with *NATO* ships and submarines, to continuously track the Russians after the P-8 returns to base.

That night, though, the intelligence-collection targets were not submarines but Russian ships: a Northern Fleet destroyer; a Russian-intelligence patrol vessel; a Soviet-era “hydrographic research” ship, operated by the Russian Navy. They hid under rain clouds and storm cover as best they could, making it difficult for the P-8 to get close. Arakali and his co-pilots flew a thousand feet above the ocean’s surface. The electronic- and acoustic-warfare operators kept their eyes glued to their screens. “With each pass, we aim to maximize the surface area for the sensors and other collection equipment,” Arakali told me.

A Norwegian frigate and a British destroyer were also patrolling these waters. When the P-8’s reconnaissance mission was complete, the team did a flyby, as a show of support for its *NATO* allies. We put on life jackets, standard practice when the plane descends below a thousand feet. The youngest pilot on board, a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant named Rusty Joyce, manned the controls. Almost all of the crew had mustaches, but Joyce’s was so wispy that you could see it only up close. He buzzed the warships at three hundred feet, and banked hard for another pass. I sat by the window, watching ocean swells froth past the tip of the wing.

A Russian operator radioed the flight crew on the public emergency-radio frequency. “Zemlya, Zemlya, Zemlya—Delta Echo Ivory Eagle,” the operator said, using call signs and protocols that had been established during the Cold War. The P-8 crew radioed back, acknowledging their presence off Kola. Sometimes Russian fighter jets escort P-8s farther from their shores.

Later, an air-traffic controller at the Kirkenes airport told me that he’d heard the chatter between the Russians and the P-8, just off the coast. “For us, this is normal,” he said. He had grown up in Kirkenes in the nineteen-sixties. Back then, Russian nuclear submarines occasionally sneaked into the Varanger Fjord, just outside of town. The anomalous period was that of post-Soviet peace, he said. Then, in 2017, a Russian electronic-warfare unit set up a G.P.S. jammer in the mountains facing Kirkenes, causing at least one plane to nearly crash. The jamming was sporadic at first; now it takes place almost every day. The air-traffic controller sighed. “We’re back to the Cold War,” he said. “And I think it’s going to be like this for the rest of my life.”

Johan Roaldsnes occasionally hosts gatherings for current and former intelligence officers at an abandoned police station that faces Russia, a short drive from Kirkenes, on the banks of the Pasvik River. They drink vodka, go in a sauna, jump in the river. Retired spies often struggle with a sense of purposelessness, Roaldsnes said—cut off from the flows of intelligence and the sources they pursued for their entire careers. But they are a fount of knowledge. Until Russia annexed Crimea, the Norwegian security services did not publicly refer to the F.S.B., Russia’s largest intelligence agency, as an adversary. Then, Roaldsnes said, “you had to get in touch with your counterintelligence people from the Cold War, dust them off, gather their insights, and get back to work.”

The P.S.T. estimates that some three hundred people work at the F.S.B. directorate in Murmansk, on the other side of the border; many of them run operations in Kirkenes and the surrounding countryside, designed to probe Norwegian defenses and critical infrastructure. “They do intelligence by trawling,” Roaldsnes told me. “Quantity is their form of quality.”

Roaldsnes, the eldest of three children, was born in 1984, and grew up on a small island off the western coast of Norway. His father was a minister and his mother worked for the municipality. Roaldsnes trained as a mechanic in high school, and went on to study physics at the University of Bergen.

![](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28922)

“They’ll become an angry mob if we don’t get these paintings inside fast.”

Cartoon by Justin Sheen

“When I arrived at university, I didn’t know a single soul,” he recalled. “I started to train in Brazilian jujitsu.” A fellow jujitsu fighter, an employee of the local psychiatric hospital, was recruiting young men who could restrain unruly patients. Roaldsnes is six feet three, with dark hair and an athletic build. He signed up to work at the hospital, and before long he “was involved in isolating a patient, together with two police officers,” he said. “I had never had a concept of policing—we didn’t have any police on the island where I grew up. And I was figuring out what to do with my life, so I asked them, ‘How is policing?’ And they said, ‘It’s O.K.’ ” The next morning, he applied to a police academy. “I go a lot by instinct,” he told me. “I don’t have a master plan.”

After three years at the police academy, Roaldsnes attended a career day, where he met a recruiting officer from the police in Finnmark, Norway’s second-largest and least populated province, in the Arctic northeast. Finnmark is more than twice the size of New Jersey, but it has only about seventy-five thousand residents. There are two major offshore oil fields and a handful of small towns, including Kirkenes. One of the largest employers in the province is the Norwegian military.

Roaldsnes arrived at the police station in Finnmark’s administrative center, Vadsø, in the fall of 2010. The town lies just across the Varanger Fjord from Kirkenes. It takes eight minutes to travel between them on a propeller plane, but about two and a half hours by car, tracing the perimeter of the fjord.

To Roaldsnes, the most interesting site in Vadsø was the refugee center, which had more than two hundred rooms and whose occupants accounted for roughly seventeen per cent of the town’s population. Many of them were from Afghanistan or East Africa; there were also a few Chechens. “There was a pretty high crime rate and a lot of fighting,” Roaldsnes said. “So I asked the local police chief if I could be in charge of the refugee facility, from the police side.”

Most of the issues stemmed from clashes among various ethnic groups—“challenges in different languages, dumbed down to violence,” as Roaldsnes put it. He set out to build source networks within the communities, and defused conflicts before crimes took place by enlisting people to tip him off to what was happening. The worst offenders were relocated south, and the rate of violence dropped.

Then, in 2014, a young Chechen who had been staying at the refugee center left to fight with *ISIS* in the Syrian war. Three other Chechens from Vadsø soon followed. It was then that Roaldsnes was recruited to work for the P.S.T. “It was all centered on Syria,” he said. “Trying to figure out what groups they were in, and whether or not they were in contact with people back home.”

The next year, *ISIS* was sending operatives into Europe, scattered among hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants who were coming from Africa and the Middle East. Suddenly, refugees were arriving at Storskog, the only official Norwegian-Russian border-crossing point, six miles from Kirkenes. “It started in May, with a few drips,” Roaldsnes told me. “And then it just rocketed.” Roaldsnes and others in the P.S.T. quickly sensed that “something was off.” The notion that the Arctic migrant route had developed organically didn’t fit with the realities of security in the Kola Peninsula. No one can reach Storskog from anywhere in Russia without a visa or written authorization from the F.S.B., which runs the border.

Norwegian Army conscripts patrolling the border.

It is illegal to cross the border on foot, but migrants seemed to have been made aware of a loophole: they traversed the final few hundred metres in wheelchairs and on cheap children’s bicycles. The P.S.T. began to believe that the Russians were deliberately sending the migrants, to incite discord in the Norwegian population and to test the limits of the country’s humanitarianism. “It was kind of an uncomfortable feeling, at the beginning, to even *think* that the Russians were doing this on purpose—weaponizing refugees, the most vulnerable segment of society,” Roaldsnes said. The demographics of the arrivals raised questions about F.S.B. involvement. At first, there were mostly Syrians. But then, he said, “we just saw higher and higher numbers of refugees from lots of strange states coming in”—forty-seven countries in all. Stranger still, many of the arrivals spoke Russian; they had been living in Russia for years, and had local residency permits. One was in his final year of medical school.

It soon became clear that a number of the arrivals had been given intelligence tasks. Some asked “unusual questions,” Roaldsnes said; others were apparently instructed to take selfies with Norwegian police or security officials in the background.

One of them, a former government official from a country in Asia, had fled criminal charges at home. In Murmansk, he had been detained and interrogated by the F.S.B. They told him that “if he didn’t comply, or support them with a task, they would let his home country know where he was,” Roaldsnes said. The Russians told the man that, after crossing the border, he should “claim to have secrets vital to Norway, show off his government credentials from his home country, and try to get in contact with Norwegian intelligence,” Roaldsnes continued. “The objective might have been to find out how somebody ends up in a P.S.T. or military-intelligence recruitment trajectory from the migrant stream. Is there a specific house? How do they do it? How do they interview you? Do they check your cell phone?” The man was instructed to send reports back to his F.S.B. handler through unsent drafts of messages in a social-media account.

The man gave himself up at the border and told the Norwegians everything. “Based on the detailed explanation, we assessed that he was likely telling the truth,” Roaldsnes told me.

“So he confessed immediately?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “But that might be part of the plot.” The man was eventually deported to his home country.

By November, 2015, more than five thousand asylum seekers had crossed at Storskog; a hundred and ninety-six of them came in a single day. “It was minus fifteen degrees one day,” Roaldsnes recalled. Some asylum seekers were wearing so little clothing that if they weren’t let into Norway they would likely die. Eventually, the Norwegian government declared Russia a safe country for asylum seekers, and started turning people back; at last, the bicycles stopped coming.

Harald Sunde, a member of Kirkenes’s municipal council. “I did not want to be a useful idiot,” he said.

Roaldsnes married another police officer, Synne, and in 2018 they moved to Kirkenes. She became the head of operations for the Finnmark police; he spent a few years running the intelligence-analysis section and then, about two years ago, became a regional head of the P.S.T. “It’s like playing chess every day at work, all while we have only some vague concept of the rules, and of what pieces are in play,” he said. “The important thing about intelligence work is to constantly try to evolve—what’s the new threat that we don’t see?”

Recently, the Russian security services have shifted their tactics from professional espionage to sabotage and destruction, often undertaken by disposable agents—random criminals who are recruited over Telegram and paid in cryptocurrency or cash. “The Russians no longer have any downsides to an operation being exposed,” Roaldsnes said. He sighed. “They ruined a great spy game with this stupid war.”

There was no dawn to mark the first day of 2023—no sunrise, not for another few weeks. In the Russian town of Nikel, thirty miles from Kirkenes, a young mercenary named Andrey Medvedev scaled two fences that had been constructed by the Russian security services not so much to keep Norwegians out as to keep Russians in. He wore white camouflage, and crept down to the banks of the Pasvik River. It looked to be frozen solid, but the only way to test it was to go across.

The ice held, mostly, and Medvedev dragged himself up the opposite bank, his feet and ankles sodden and numb. He pulled a bottle of vodka out of his rucksack and collapsed in exhaustion on Norwegian ground.

The Globus systems, in Vardø, can track the trajectory of Russia’s nuclear missiles.

When Roaldsnes awoke, a few hours later, he learned that there was a strange arrival in police custody. Medvedev was the first commander of the Wagner Group—a Russian paramilitary organization—to present as a defector to the West. Medvedev told the police that he had led a Wagner unit on the front lines in Ukraine, and had witnessed battlefield atrocities committed by his comrades. One of his subordinates—a convicted murderer, who had joined the Wagner Group in return for a pardon—was executed with a sledgehammer, on camera, after the group’s leadership judged him a traitor. “Live like a dog, die like a dog,” Wagner’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had said of the man. Now Medvedev said that he would testify against Prigozhin.

Yet Roaldsnes wondered whether Medvedev posed a counterintelligence risk. How had he managed to slip through the Kola Peninsula, one of the most highly controlled places on earth? Was he really a defector? Or was he a double agent? A fraud?

Medvedev told the police that, as he dashed across the river, he’d heard Russian border guards firing at him and the barking of a military dog sent to chase him down. But the Norwegians found no paw prints at the border, and they had detected no shots.

Kirkenes was no place for a possible defector; the Russians had too great a presence in town. The police quietly relocated Medvedev to Oslo, some nine hundred miles southwest. In the next few months, Medvedev acquired a reputation for erratic behavior and drunken fights. He also sought publicity, and gave inconsistent and unreliable accounts of his experiences in Ukraine. He even apparently tried to cross back over the border, into Russia. A theory developed among P.S.T. officers that the F.S.B.—believing that Medvedev would be a headache, and a drain on resources, for Norway—had not impeded his escape. (Medvedev could not be reached for comment.) Within the P.S.T., he became known as “the agent of chaos.” “At some point, you understand that you’re maybe chasing the loudest balls, and that makes you less able to see the sneaky ones,” Roaldsnes told me. “Two years ago, we got a lot of tips about people photographing a covert safe house,” he said. “We found out that a rare Pokémon was there,” in the augmented-reality game Pokémon Go.

In 2022, the P.S.T. arrested a Russian military-intelligence officer named Mikhail Mikushin, who was working in a research program dedicated to hybrid threats at the Arctic University of Norway, in Tromsø. He was operating undercover as José Giammaria, a Brazilian academic, and had spent several years in Canada, developing his credentials; he had even written about the threat that Russia poses to Arctic security in an article for the *Canadian Naval Review*. Mikushin’s arrest was unusual. Espionage is rarely prosecuted in Norway. Often, it is better to let rival services carry on using compromised sources and methods. Spies and their handlers communicate through all kinds of signals and codes—a vase in a window, a blip on the radio, a misplaced brick in a wall. Detection is difficult, but the goal in most P.S.T. operations, Roaldsnes said, is to “transform each mystery into a well-kept secret”—and then “close the doors in front of the adversary, without them being aware that we were even there.”

One of the old K.G.B. tactics that has been revived in recent years is the use of “travelling agents,” known as *marshrutniki*. These people are not really spies, just civilians who are recruited to complete a specific intelligence task, sometimes through extortion or the promise of cash, sometimes through an appeal to their patriotism. “Satellite photos don’t give you everything,” Roaldsnes told me. “You have to have eyes on the target.” Many *marshrutniki* are dual citizens, or students or businesspeople with legitimate reasons to travel. They don’t need to understand the significance of the assignment; they just have to complete it.

![](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a60422)

“We kept adding amenities to lure people back to the office until it was easier if we just became a bar.”

Cartoon by Benjamin Slyngstad

One morning last fall, I boarded a ferry from Kirkenes to Tromsø, a journey of about thirty-six hours along the northernmost coastline in continental Europe. The Varanger Fjord was placid leading out to the Barents Sea. A couple of hours later, I went out on the top deck—just before the small town of Vardø came into view. Only one other passenger seemed to know what would soon appear on the horizon. She was in late middle age, with brown hair, and had positioned herself in such a way that no one inside the boat could see her. I noticed that she was filming the approach to Vardø, her phone propped against the railing but hidden by her torso, which leaned forward in a faux-casual pose. I drew closer. She pulled back the phone. I saw its screen for a second: the language was Russian; the time zone read Murmansk.

Vardø is a fishing village, but its skyline is dominated by successive generations of gigantic radar systems, known as Globus I, II, and III. Officially, the Globus systems monitor “space junk.” But they have another use: they can track and calculate the trajectories of ballistic nuclear missiles. The Globus complex, though it was built by American contractors, is operated by Norway’s military-intelligence service. In the late nineties, a storm blew the cover off one of the radar balls, revealing a system that was aimed straight at the Kola Peninsula.

Russia has signalled its displeasure with the Globus systems by practicing to blow them up. In recent years, bombers have flown toward the radars in attack formations, peeling off just before crossing into Norwegian airspace. Hackers have infiltrated the municipal council’s internal e-mail system, and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church have applied to build a chapel in Vardø, despite no local demand for services.

Now, as the Globus balls loomed ahead of us, passengers started streaming onto the deck. The woman abandoned her surreptitious approach and held up her cell phone, taking a video for at least ten minutes—the whole route to the Globus complex, and the path into the quiet harbor behind it.

After we left Vardø, the likely *marshrutnik* sat alone, with no luggage. Late that night, we reached a small village called Båtsfjord—the only place besides Kirkenes and Tromsø where Russian fishing boats are still allowed to dock. She tried to get off the ferry, but the staff wouldn’t let her, because there were no scheduled departures.

Another day passed. She seemed to have not prepared for this—she had no change of clothes. When we arrived in Tromsø, close to midnight, she disembarked, wrapped in a blanket stolen from the ship.

T he war in Ukraine is more than a thousand miles south of Kirkenes, and yet it imbues every aspect of the town’s identity, economy, and future. On the day of the invasion, the mayor cried. Russians and their families make up between five and ten per cent of the population, and until recently the town depended on cross-border trade. Roaldsnes could see the war in struggling local businesses; in the layoffs at the ship-repair factory, one of the largest employers in town, after E.U. sanctions prevented work on Russian trawlers; in the despondency and bewilderment of schoolteachers, sports coaches, and politicians, who had spent the past three decades building connections with their Russian counterparts. Many of them had believed that there was something unique and almost borderless about Arctic regional coöperation. Geopolitics was a matter for the capitals, they said; up here, the motto was “High North, low tensions.” Life in the Arctic is difficult enough without worrying about the nuclear warheads just over the horizon. But sentiment had started to change. And when the narrative shifts in Kirkenes, so does the behavior of nations.

Kirkenes was originally a company town, built in the early nineteen-hundreds to exploit an iron-ore deposit. The local mining company employed fifteen hundred people at its peak, but it languished in the eighties, and, with few other economic prospects, the population atrophied. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, opening up the possibility of establishing ties and trade with the nearest city: Murmansk.

Georgii Chentemirov, a journalist exiled from Russia who settled in Kirkenes.

“In the months after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Murmansk was total chaos,” Thomas Nilsen, the journalist, told me. Soldiers went months without wages; some desperate civilians fainted from hunger or froze. Russia’s Northern Fleet was so destitute that it rented out one of its nuclear submarines to transport vegetables to a port in Siberia, potatoes loaded into the missile compartment. “Everything collapsed—everything,” Nilsen, who was freelancing in Murmansk at the time, said. “The currency, the markets, the food-supply chain. Even I, with my foreign currency, had to spend much of my day trying to find food.”

Throughout the nineties, Nilsen researched the environmental ravages of industrial mining and poorly managed nuclear waste in the Kola Peninsula. The region accounted for almost twenty per cent of all nuclear reactors on earth; now it was scattered with decaying tankers and barges loaded with spent nuclear fuel. “There were a hundred and thirty nuclear-powered submarines that had been taken out of operation, and they posed the threat of what you could absolutely call a Chernobyl in slow motion,” he told me. One of the Northern Fleet’s submarines had sunk, in 1989, and hadn’t been salvaged; its reactor lay at the bottom of the Norwegian Sea, along with two torpedoes with nuclear warheads, corroding in salt water. Nuclear waste, marked “for scrapping,” was left outside of shipyards, exposed to weather.

But Kirkenes was suddenly alive. “I came back here for summer vacation in ’92, when the border opened,” a local air-ambulance pilot, Tor Ivar Dahl Pettersen, told me. “It was just the Wild West, and the police had no control. Some Russians set up a bordello down in the industrial area, and everybody knew about it. The ships came in from Russia, and they were selling anything to anyone who wanted it. Cigarettes and vodka, mostly, but you could buy anything but a tank.” He laughed. The Russians “would never want to go back to that again, because it must have been the most depressing moment in their lives. They went from being a superpower to being the poorest men anywhere. And all dignity was gone. They were offering up their wives just to get money for food.”

The newspaper in Kirkenes printed instructions for donating to the soup kitchen in Nikel. A Norwegian former border inspector, Frode Berg, told me that his Russian counterparts were so ill-equipped that in winter, when the temperature was minus thirty-five degrees, they wore sneakers. “We bought them food, and various things for their wives—fabrics and sewing materials, so that they could make clothes,” Berg said. “We’d take them to civilian shops and buy them green jackets. They were very happy. We helped them a lot.”

But it is not clear that the Russians perceived such gestures as they were intended. “The worn-out phrase ‘We feel sorry for Russia’ comes automatically,” a Russian journalist wrote, after a trip to Norway. “Every Russian-speaking person is apparently to be interrogated: Is it true that there is hunger in your country?” Former K.G.B. officers and their families were suddenly reliant on the good will of a mining and reindeer-herding community in one of Norway’s poorest and least developed districts.

In the center of Kirkenes, there is a bronze bust of the late Thorvald Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian minister of defense and foreign affairs, whose son is the current head of *NATO*. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he led an initiative to unite the business, cultural, and educational interests of Arctic Europe. Norway established an entity in Kirkenes called the Barents Secretariat, to fund projects with such titles as To Russia with Love. “It was about sport, cultural exchange, music, bands going across from one country to another, choir, singing, environmental projects—lots of activities,” Harald Sunde, a member of the municipal council, told me.

Russia opened a consulate in Kirkenes, and local Norwegian officials rushed to revive friendship agreements that had been signed in the late Soviet years with the district of Pechenga and with Severomorsk, a closed military town that serves as headquarters of the Northern Fleet. “That was a strange one,” Sunde said. “It was a friendship agreement with a municipality that you cannot visit.”

For the next two decades, relations bloomed. Norwegians drove into Russia for cheap haircuts, alcohol, and fuel; Russians came to Kirkenes to buy diapers, appliances, and luxury goods. The Kirkenes hockey team joined a Russian league; the Norwegian and Russian border guards held an annual soccer match. “Scandinavian historians, together with Russian colleagues, were willing to narrate the history of our northernmost regions as this kind of romantic idea of a place that transcends borders and countries and time,” Kari Aga Myklebost, the Barents Chair in Russian Studies at the Arctic University of Norway, told me. “Even though the Barents Region is a political construct from 1993.”

In 2012, Vladimir Putin signed into law new limits on the freedom of expression. “That resulted in many of the Russian N.G.O.s that were working with Norway to be branded as ‘foreign agents,’ ” the term the Kremlin uses to stigmatize and oppress civil society, Nilsen said. “Environmental groups, human-rights groups, youth groups, Indigenous peoples’ groups—pretty much every group that was being supported by the Barents Secretariat faced that risk.”

Nilsen and his colleague Atle Staalesen were employed by the Secretariat, which published their bilingual English and Russian news Web site, the Barents Observer. But, in 2014, when Nilsen wrote a column condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the Russian consul-general in Kirkenes at the time, Mikhail Noskov, called the Observer a destructive force in Norwegian-Russian relations. The F.S.B. had repeatedly complained about the Observer to Norwegian authorities. Now an official for the Secretariat asked Nilsen to stop writing about Crimea; he refused, and was subsequently fired. (The Secretariat contests this version of events.) Staalesen quit soon afterward. “The Barents Observer was effectively shut down by the Norwegian government, at the behest of the Russian government,” Staalesen told me. “It was very symptomatic of what was to come.”

“In order to coöperate, you have to turn a blind eye to realities,” a former high-school principal, who spent decades working on cross-border collaborations, told me. “And, from 2014 onward, we had the sense that the security services controlled our Russian partners.” Increasingly, many Norwegians’ Russian contacts weren’t ordinary businessmen—they were officers or proxies of the intelligence apparatus, and they were using the ties between the two countries to turn Norwegians into assets.

In January, a Norwegian man in the district of East Finnmark agreed to meet me at three-thirty in the morning—the night of polar night. I had heard that he was an F.S.B. informant, working under duress. At first, the man repeatedly denied the allegations. Then I told him that I wasn’t guessing; my source was another person from the region who had ended up in F.S.B. custody.

“Then you already know,” he said. “They use any means they can.”

The man had been investigated by Norwegian authorities, who discovered evidence of crimes on his hard drive. The police informed their Russian counterparts, since the man routinely travelled to Russia, and asked for assistance in investigating his activities on the other side. “Of course, when they had this information in Russia, I was called into the immigration office,” the man told me. “They showed the documents from the Norwegian police. And then they said, ‘O.K., we can use this to arrest you, and put you in jail.’ ” The only way out was to coöperate with the F.S.B. “They forced me to sign a contract with them,” he said. The contract was in Russian, which he couldn’t read. But they assigned him a code name, and instructed him to go back to East Finnmark to collect the names of people who worked for the P.S.T.

Since then, the man had been called in to meet with the F.S.B. at least half a dozen times. “They were pushing me all the time,” he said. “Could I get more information?” His work for the F.S.B. exposed him to the risk of prosecution for espionage in Norway. But he had family ties to Russia, and kept going back and forth. He became consumed by paranoia, turning on loud fans to prevent possible microphones from capturing conversations, even with his wife. “It was fucking stressful,” he told me. “I started drinking more, and drinking more.”

Some Norwegians have been compromised in banyas or brothels and then extorted. Others have faced pressure to facilitate corruption and bribes. In one case, a Norwegian businessman claimed to have received an explosive device through a window of his office, in Murmansk, apparently as an inducement to sign over a controlling share of his company. “If your business becomes big enough, the mafia takes over,” a senior military-intelligence officer in Kirkenes told me. “If it becomes even more successful, then the F.S.B. takes over. And then you’re in big, big trouble.”

Another local who ended up in the sway of the F.S.B. was Frode Berg, the border inspector. In 1992, he befriended a man named Anatoly Vozniuk, who served as a Russian border inspector and interpreter. “Everyone liked him,” Berg told me. “He was full of jokes, always smiling.” Vozniuk usually kept a bottle of vodka in his backpack, and when they were alone in the forest he would pull it out and offer some to Berg. “Other Russian officers, if they did the same things that Anatoly was doing, after a short time we’d never see them again,” Berg said. But Vozniuk “was friends with special people—with Russian generals, with colonels,” Berg recalled. “He knew many people in the government in Murmansk.”

During the next decade,the two men became “best friends.” “I called him ‘the monkey,’ ” Berg said, laughing. “I’d be walking in the forest, and I’d hear a chicken clucking at me. And it was him! We would work all day, then sit and eat together, and speak about everything.” Vozniuk would take out the vodka, “and we didn’t go home before it was empty.”

By the early two-thousands, Vozniuk was driving Berg into Russia and introducing him to regional politicians and senior military and intelligence officers in the Kola Peninsula. “He was lifting me up to another level in Russia,” Berg said. “We were meeting different people in the banyas—everyone who had an important position.” When Russian officials visited Kirkenes, Berg was often summoned for drinks. The governor of Murmansk once brought Berg a small statue of a silver rocket, he recalled, “and, when you turned the top, there was a bottle of vodka inside.”

Before long, counterintelligence officers at the P.S.T. concluded that Vozniuk was targeting men like Berg as assets for the F.S.B. “It was always ‘Anatoly, Anatoly, Anatoly,’ ” Berg said. He rolled his eyes.

Vozniuk was taking Berg into restricted military areas, giving him tours of the border stations and of surveillance towers that looked into Norway. Vozniuk never brought him into areas of acute secrecy—submarine ports, military bases. But he made Berg feel like a V.I.P. Then Vozniuk started asking for the names of P.S.T. officers. Berg didn’t see a problem. Vozniuk had already seen the faces of certain officers at official meetings—he just didn’t necessarily know all of their names.

Around 2010, Vozniuk was promoted to serve as the official F.S.B. representative to Norway. I asked Berg whether he suspects that Vozniuk’s promotion was a reward for his success in eliciting information from him. “Yeah, from me and from other people,” he said. “They put it together—all the information that he collected.”

Berg’s story was not done. Shortly after Russia annexed Crimea, Norway’s military-intelligence service recruited Vasily Zemlyakov, an engineer at a shipyard that maintained nuclear submarines for the Northern Fleet. The deal was simple: cash for secrets. Zemlyakov instructed the service to send the money to the home of his cousin Natalya, in Moscow.

Whatever the P.S.T.’s concerns about Berg and his relationship with Vozniuk, the military-intelligence service decided that his routine jaunts across the border made him a suitable courier. In the next three years, Berg made several trips to Russia, and mailed cash and memory cards to Natalya’s address. Berg claims that he didn’t know what the operation was about—he just did as he was told. In return, top-secret files on the Northern Fleet’s strategic nuclear submarines were conveyed to Norway. But the sender was not Zemlyakov, who was in fact working as a double agent. It was the F.S.B.

In December, 2017, Berg made another trip to Moscow. When he stepped out of his hotel, two men grabbed him and brought him to F.S.B. headquarters, a couple of blocks away.

Berg was taken to an isolation cell in Lefortovo Prison, Russia’s notorious detention center for political prisoners, critics, poets, and spies. He recalls being questioned by F.S.B. officers sixteen times. Since Berg didn’t speak more than “vodka Russian,” as he put it, the service brought in an interpreter: his old friend Anatoly Vozniuk.

Berg was charged with espionage, but Vozniuk tried to convince him that he didn’t need independent legal representation. “Take the F.S.B. lawyer,” he said. When Berg opted instead for a well-known attorney for political prisoners, Vozniuk folded his arms and said, “Our friendship is over.” (Vozniuk could not be reached for comment.)

Berg was held for a year and a half before being found guilty of espionage and sentenced to fourteen years in a penal colony. He was exchanged in a spy swap soon afterward. (The Norwegian military-intelligence agency declined to comment.) When I met him in Kirkenes, five years after his release, he handed me a stack of Russian court documents detailing the F.S.B.’s Zemlyakov operation. But it seemed as if the thing that bothered him most about his ordeal was that Vozniuk hadn’t been joking when he’d said their friendship was over. “I tried writing an e-mail to him, and calling,” Berg said. “But Anatoly has changed his number.”

After breaking with the Barents Secretariat, Thomas Nilsen and Atle Staalesen relaunched the Observer as an independent entity. “We were the only Nordic media outlet to publish in the Russian language,” Nilsen said. “We had thousands and thousands of readers in Russia, because people could read the things here that they couldn’t find in other places.”

Their reporting has shown that, for at least the past decade, the Kremlin has been exploiting the Barents coöperation arrangements for intelligence purposes. In some cases, the F.S.B. used cultural projects as cover to send intelligence agents into Norway. But the larger effort has been to gradually establish the narrative that the people of East Finnmark owe their freedom—and perhaps also their land and their history—to Russia. The F.S.B., operating through various cover organizations, has spent decades engaging in ideological subversion in Kirkenes, rooted in the manipulation of local history, in order to make the region more friendly to Russia. “You can use this area to create chaos,” Roaldsnes told me.

It was in this context that Roaldsnes decided to come forward and describe his work—a rare instance of an active-duty counterintelligence officer going public. “One of my fears is that you have a level of intelligence failure in the F.S.B.’s foreign department that says that this region is a good subject to create a crisis for *NATO*,” Roaldsnes said. He recalled the Russian services’ misreading of Ukraine—their belief that it would take only three days to capture Kyiv, and that many Ukrainians would welcome the Russian Army as a liberating force. That intelligence failure stemmed from the tendency of the Russian security apparatus to report what it thinks the Kremlin leadership wants to hear. He told me, “I’m engaging in kind of an active form of counterintelligence now—to not give any leeway, and to be a bit outspoken about this threat and how it materializes.”

The Russian narrative begins around five hundred years ago, when a marauding Russian bandit named Mitrofan experienced a sudden change of heart. After a life of robbing and killing, he was ordered by God to “go to a land that is not promised and not useful,” as the Russian Orthodox Church later put it. He gave up alcohol and violence, tied a rope around his waist, and walked north, to the valleys and fjords where the Pasvik River spills into the Barents Sea. Mitrofan converted many of the native Sámi people to Christianity, and built a few modest wooden chapels. In death, he became known as St. Tryphon.

In 1826, when Norwegian and Russian officials set out to draw the border between the two nations, they decided that the natural boundary lay in the river. But the remnants of one of St. Tryphon’s chapels, the Church of Boris and Gleb, were just on the Norwegian side of the river in South Varanger, which is now part of Finnmark. The Russians insisted on carving out a small postage stamp of land and designating it as Orthodox—and therefore Russian—territory.

Then, a couple of years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Alexei Badanin, the head of the Orthodox Church on the Kola Peninsula, called into question the legitimacy of the border line—not just the postage stamp but the entire thing. “South Varanger—this is our Orthodox land,” he said. “It was given up in 1826 by unscrupulous officials.” St. Tryphon had built another small chapel about fifteen miles west of Kirkenes. Should that be in Russia, too?

Badanin is a former Northern Fleet commander who in the early two-thousands began dedicating himself to the study and veneration of St. Tryphon. Some years into his religious journey, he took the name Mitrofan, too. Like his namesake, Badanin has spent lots of time on the Norwegian side of the border—meeting local dignitaries and spreading St. Tryphon’s teachings. But some of his behavior struck people as out of synch with his role as a priest: in 2019, for example, he sought to obtain information on a facility that provides drinking water for Kirkenes.

Badanin’s second career has coincided with the transformation of the Russian Orthodox Church into a kind of spiritual arm of the Kremlin’s military-intelligence structure. Priests bless nuclear missiles and tell front-line troops that they will be resurrected if they die in Ukraine. Western security and intelligence services have warned that the Kremlin is particularly reliant on the Orthodox Church abroad—both for recruiting intelligence sources and for carrying out influence operations—because it is not directly affected by international sanctions.

In Finnmark, the work of men like Mitrofan Badanin goes beyond recruitment and propaganda. According to Myklebost, the professor, it’s about ideological subversion, sensitizing the local population to the idea that Russia’s presence in Finnmark predates that of the Norwegian state. “They use history to legitimatize the idea that this is part of the Russian cultural sphere,” Myklebost said.

Badanin has taken a particular interest in the history of the Pomors, a small seafaring group that originated in Russia but whose members spent much of the past millennium hunting and fishing in what is now northern Norway. The Pomors left traces of Orthodox crosses wherever they had been. In the past decade, representatives of the Orthodox Church have systematically restored old Pomor crosses and erected new ones. The area coincides with the exact territory that would be most strategically useful to Russia’s nuclear defense—Norway’s entire Barents Sea coastline, all the way up to the Svalbard archipelago, where the top Russian official is believed to be a military-intelligence operative serving under diplomatic cover. (The official denies this.)

“Now that they have the crosses, and a Russian Orthodox priest has been there, sprinkling his holy water, the narrative back home is that these are Russian holy lands,” Myklebost told me. “This also means that they can be defended militarily.” Last year, Russian outlets started claiming that the Pentagon was constructing a secret biological-weapons laboratory on a small island between Svalbard and mainland Norway. Similar fabrications were made about sites in Ukraine to help justify the invasion.

Badanin, as the leading Orthodox authority in the Kola Peninsula, also oversees a small church in Kirkenes, near the port. Although it’s in Norwegian territory, the local priest—a dual Russian-Norwegian citizen—officially answers to him. Badanin hasn’t visited Norway since the outbreak of the war. But last summer he gave a sermon at the Church of Boris and Gleb, in the Russian postage stamp on the Norwegian side of the river. “Here starts a hostile and unfriendly world,” he told his followers. On another occasion, speaking to a group of soldiers, he wondered what would happen if Russia lost the war in Ukraine: “Is there any point to continue history? Or is it time to bring fire and sulfur to earth, and let everything burn?”

Such threats are not abstract in South Varanger. On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest ever nuclear bomb, on a remote Barents Sea archipelago called Novaya Zemlya. The explosion was more than three thousand times as powerful as Hiroshima, and generated an “atmospheric disturbance” that “orbited the earth three times,” according to two Soviet scientists who worked on the bomb. Six hundred miles from the blast site, Norwegian conscripts stood transfixed at their border posts, watching the horizon glow.

In recent years, the Russian government has also been using the history of the Second World War and its aftermath to drive a wedge between locals and the government in Oslo. One day, Harald Sunde, from Kirkenes’s municipal council, who has written two local-history books, took me on a tour of the town. Like many people there, he is fascinated by the lingering presence of the war—trenches and bunkers dug in peoples’ back yards, rusted cannisters and remnants of heavy weaponry scattered among the fjords. The Germans occupied Kirkenes for four years and used the area as a staging ground for tens of thousands of troops during a failed assault on Murmansk. The Soviet Air Force, meanwhile, carried out so many bombing runs on Kirkenes that only thirteen homes were left unscathed.

During the Nazi occupation, a number of people in South Varanger were trained by Soviet intelligence to act as partisans—gathering information on German positions and transmitting it covertly to the Soviet Red Army. When the Nazis retreated from the area, in October, 1944, and Soviet troops moved in, “they supposedly treated the civilians very well,” Sunde said. “And they left afterward. They didn’t stay here, like they did in many other areas in Europe, like the Baltic states, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.”

Sunde led me to a monument, just outside the town center, depicting a triumphant Soviet soldier clutching a rifle. The original design called for the statue to be forty feet tall, and for the soldier to be crushing a German eagle under his foot, he said. But, by the time it was under construction, West Germany was being integrated into *NATO*, and so it was built at half the height, with the foot on a rock.

During the Cold War, East Finnmark was regarded by the rest of Norway as ideologically distant. Norway joined *NATO* as a founding member; the people of South Varanger elected a Communist mayor. In the fifties and sixties, officers with the domestic-security service—a predecessor to the P.S.T.—carried out illegal surveillance of former partisans and suspected Communists in South Varanger, and sought to prohibit them from being employed at the mine. The Soviets seized on these divisions, establishing a Norwegian-Soviet Friendship Society and pushing the message that Oslo didn’t care about the north—that the government was merely a tool of officials in Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In the nineties, the security service underwent a public reckoning, opening its files to all who had been wrongfully surveilled. The King of Norway apologized to the partisans and honored their contributions to the fight against Nazism. “But this is a very vivid, very important part of public memory in East Finnmark,” Myklebost said. “At the same time, it’s very clearly used by the Russian Foreign Ministry and its diplomatic representatives in Norway.”

About a decade ago, Myklebost noticed that the Russian consul-general in Kirkenes had started systematically mapping, restoring, and holding ceremonies at monuments erected to honor Soviet soldiers and prisoners, whom the Nazis imported to Norway to build railway lines, roads, and other infrastructure. The Russians also erected new monuments, and falsely implied that the Red Army had liberated all of northern Norway, not just Kirkenes. Norwegian history enthusiasts—pensioners, mostly, who were upset by the mistreatment of the partisans—attended the ceremonies. The Russian delegations included politicians and Orthodox bishops, and were often organized by the head of the F.S.B.’s veterans group in Murmansk. These “patriotic memory tours,” as the visits were called, received funding from the Barents Secretariat. They also served as cover for at least one F.S.B. agent to travel all over East Finnmark.

In official F.S.B. publications and the Russian press, Norwegian participants were depicted as endorsing Kremlin narratives on behalf of Norwegian organizations that, in fact, did not exist. When the mayor of Vardø attended a ceremony, he was given a St. George ribbon—a symbol of support for the Russian military—and photographed wearing it. Around that time, Putin invited the then mayor of Kirkenes to the Russian Embassy in Oslo, to be awarded the Order of Friendship.

Each October, Russian officials visit the Soviet war memorial in Kirkenes, to commemorate the liberation from the Nazis. Until recently, the monument was “a site of brotherhood and friendship,” Harald Sunde told me. For its seventy-fifth anniversary, in 2019, Putin sent his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, along with the commander of the Northern Fleet. Norway sent its foreign minister, its Prime Minister, and its king. Before the ceremony, Sunde was invited, along with a few other partisan-history enthusiasts, to meet Lavrov. Sunde had discovered a partisan cave in the mountains and written a book about the resistance movement; now he presented a copy to Lavrov, and shook his hand.

Two years later, the new Russian consul-general, Nikolai Konygin, invited Sunde and several other Norwegians to the consulate. He poured them shots of vodka and pinned a medal from the Russian Ministry of Defense to each of their jackets. Sunde was proud of his work on partisan history. But the ceremony made him uncomfortable, and he sipped only half of the shot. Soon afterward, he asked the P.S.T. for advice on how to avoid being exploited for propaganda purposes. “I did not want to be in their pocket,” he told me, of the Russians. “I did not want to be a useful idiot.”

A few days into the invasion of Ukraine, Sunde walked into the consulate and returned his Russian medal, in protest. The next time Konygin spoke at the Soviet war memorial, he told the assembled guests that, just as the Soviets had liberated them from the Nazis, so Russia was now striving to liberate Ukraine.

In October, 2023, Sunde co-wrote an editorial in a local paper, warning that the presence of any Russian official at the annual ceremony would be “an insult to Norway, to Ukraine, and to victims of war in all countries.”

Three days before the event, Sunde walked into a flower shop to order a yellow wreath on behalf of the municipality. The plan was to place it atop a makeshift pedestal—a step stool draped in a blue tablecloth—at the foot of the monument, to represent the Ukrainian flag.

“Have the Russians ordered anything?” he asked the shop owner.

“No, Harald—nothing yet.”

But when Sunde returned to pick up the wreath, two days later, he ran into one of Konygin’s assistants at the shop. The man had come to collect a wreath of identical size, in Russian colors. “You know, you’re not welcome tomorrow, at the monument,” Sunde said to him. The man just smiled and walked away.

Early the next morning, Sunde arrived at the monument to set up the pedestal. The mayor, Magnus Mæland, appeared, and Sunde handed him the wreath. “I don’t believe in low tension anymore,” Mæland, who had been elected just a few weeks earlier, told me. “I believe that we have to be strong, because the only language that the Putin regime understands is strength. If you’re not telling your whole opinion to the Russians, they will take your silence as approval.”

The ceremony was held at 8:30 *a*.*m*., to insure that the Russians didn’t beat them to it. There were a half-dozen journalists present, but no townspeople. Mæland addressed the crowd: “In 1944, Ukrainian soldiers were among those in the Soviet Red Army who contributed to our liberation.” He went on, “Today, we support Ukraine in its pursuit of liberation.”

Mæland and Sunde left. Then, just before 11 *A*.*M*., a small group of townspeople started to assemble—Russian citizens and their supporters living in Kirkenes. A pair of cars with blue diplomatic plates pulled up to the monument. Konygin climbed out and delivered a speech, wearing a St. George ribbon. The air was frigid—his breath turned to mist as he spoke. Sunde learned of the Russians’ arrival, and hurried over. He stood alone with his arms crossed, his back turned to Konygin in protest. Some of the Russian townspeople snickered.

Konygin finished his remarks, and placed the Russian wreath below Sunde’s makeshift pedestal. Then he retrieved another display—an enormous array with plastic flowers—and placed it over the municipality’s wreath, smothering it.

Sunde turned his head, then whirled around, enraged. “Nikolai, you can’t do that!” he said. He walked over to Konygin, but Konygin acted as if Sunde didn’t exist. He and his retinue walked back to their vehicles and drove off.

To several of the Norwegian journalists at the scene, Konygin’s actions felt like an act of domination, an assertion of Russian power—and perhaps even sovereignty—over a patch of Norwegian land. Sunde called Mæland, who returned and placed Konygin’s plastic flower display to the side of the monument. Mæland began to speak to the journalists and Russians who were still present. “You must respect the South Varanger municipality,” he said.

As he spoke, a Russian woman who lives in Kirkenes slipped behind him. She picked up Konygin’s display and placed it back on top of the municipality’s wreath.

That night, Konygin’s display went missing. It was late October, and the river was still flowing. Then came the *mørketid*, and when it lifted—when the first dawn came, two months later, and the sun breached the horizon at last—those plastic flowers were entombed in the ice.

After the ceremony, Russian officials summoned Norway’s Ambassador in Moscow and lodged a complaint against Mæland, calling his response to Konygin “an act of vandalism” and a “violation of the memory of the soldiers-liberators.” Soon afterward, an anonymous Facebook account circulated a Photoshopped image of Mæland standing at the memorial as a suicide drone flew at his head. Then Sunde led a successful effort for South Varanger to cancel its friendship agreement with the district of Pechenga. (The agreement with Severomorsk, the headquarters of the Northern Fleet, had been scrapped a year into the war.) “Think of this area as a pot of water on a low boil,” Roaldsnes told me, over a Christmas lunch of salted sheep. “Once in a while, it boils over.”

The Russian Embassy in Oslo declined to answer detailed questions, claiming that this article is “unworthy of substantive comment, since it is a malicious fiction.” But, while I was living in Kirkenes, last November, days before the sun set for the last time of the year, more Russian hybrid operations that had been tested in Kirkenes started being replicated, at scale, all over Europe. The F.S.B. rounded up migrants from Africa and the Middle East and pushed them across the border into northern Finland, in subzero temperatures. Then a Russian electronic-warfare unit started jamming G.P.S. signals in the Baltic Sea. Tens of thousands of civilian flights have been affected—alarms blaring in the cockpit, passengers blissfully unaware. The Kremlin also issued criminal charges against the Prime Minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas, for her decision to remove Soviet war memorials. “Crimes against the memory of those who liberated the world from Nazism and Fascism must be punished,” a spokesperson for the foreign minister said. “This is just the beginning.”

When the Kremlin first announced mobilizations, to restock the front line in Ukraine, hundreds of wealthy Russians fled to Kirkenes. Suddenly, the hotels were filled with “young Russian men wearing expensive sweatpants,” as Roaldsnes put it. Most of them continued on; Kirkenes was just a choke point on the way out. Many will likely never return—a man from Murmansk parked his Lamborghini at the Kirkenes airport, removed the license plate, and vanished.

Among those who stayed was Georgii Chentemirov, the former head of the journalists’ union in Karelia, just south of the Kola Peninsula. Chentemirov left Russia six months into the war and joined the staff of the Barents Observer. A few months later, the Kremlin declared him a foreign agent, and government officials in Karelia began reposting anonymous blog posts saying that he was a traitor.

In Kirkenes, Chentemirov’s new neighbors are Russians who support the war. “They believe Russian propaganda,” he told me. “I don’t understand it, because Russian propaganda says that we need to destroy Europe. And they live in Europe!”

Chentemirov joined a local boxing class, in a bomb shelter that had been converted into a gym. I joined as well, for several weeks of the *mørketid*, and was often paired with a fighter from Kherson, near Crimea, who had a thick scar that ran below his left cheekbone, from his nose almost to his ear. I never learned which side of the war he was on—Kherson has been won and lost by each side. Chentemirov, who is six feet three, usually trained against the only other person in the group who was as tall as him: a man in his mid-thirties named Igor, who worked as a driver and courier for Konygin.

There were only two heavy punching bags, so some pairs had to practice on pads that had been duct-taped around concrete support pillars. The coach shouted instructions in Russian. The lights flickered. After class, my sweat always turned into ice. “Some people cannot stand the dark time,” a local had told me. “But you have to be able to cope with it, or else you cannot live here.” Chentemirov and Igor stood on opposite sides of a pillar, punching the concrete between them. ♦

*A previous version of this piece misspelled Kari Aga Myklebost’s last name.*

 
 

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