A tiny border town in Norway’s Arctic is one of Russia’s last links to Europe

In the year since the war on Ukraine, the Western world has made Russia persona non grata. The country’s planes are blocked from airspace in North America and the European Union, its banks booted from international payments, its oil banned and its vessels excluded from ports. Poland is preparing the installation of an electric fence along its 200-kilometre border with Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave.

But high above the Arctic Circle in Norway, the road signs still point the way to nearby Murmansk in Cyrillic and the border gates to Russia swing open every morning, letting a flow of vehicles slip across a frontier that the rest of the Western world has slammed shut. The Storskog Border Station is the only crossing between Russia and Europe’s Schengen area that remains open.

A few kilometres away, the town of Kirkenes is one of only three remaining Western ports, all in northern Norway, that continue to welcome Russian ships. Fishing vessels from Russia’s Barents Sea fleet, some 140 metres long and crewed by 100 people, crowd the wharves, keeping local marine mechanics busier than ever.

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS

Russian seamen roam the town, swimming at the pool and frequenting shops. Luxury vehicles with Russian licence plates cruise through town, some destined for the airport where their owners can jet off to holiday homes in the south of Europe.

The local Russian consulate resumed processing visas this month for those interested in visiting. A local travel zone remains in effect, allowing authorized residents on either side of the border to cross visa-free.

The obvious Russian presence in Kirkenes has been discomfiting to some here. A van parked a few metres from the consulate is painted in the colours of Ukraine’s flag with the words “Stop War Stop Putin.”

“It’s not a very easy thing to go to work every day, and work to serve Russian vessels the way things are now internationally,” acknowledged Terje Jørgensen, the local harbourmaster.

Money is at least one part of the reason. The Russian fishing vessels bring to shore huge catches of crab and cod, along with considerable revenue that supports the local population.

But their presence has also made Kirkenes a testing ground for a question that has sweeping resonance at a time of rising authoritarian bellicosity. Is it still possible for a Western democracy to live together with a Russia whose leader is intent on annexing – and destroying – another democracy?

In Brussels or Washington or even Ottawa, that question is often theoretical. In Kirkenes, it is as tangible as the people walking down the street.

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This region east of the Pasvik River has always been a place between. Before the border was fixed in 1826, people here paid taxes to the Russian czar, the king of Denmark and the king of Norway and Sweden.

For centuries, Pomor traders in the area exchanged Russian flour for fish and pelts from northern Norway, an exchange so rich it led to the development a local pidgin trading tongue.

It was the Red Army that booted Nazi forces from Kirkenes, whose port and iron mine Germany had coveted. “They were saluted as liberators,” said Knut Kristoffersen, a member of a local historical society.

The Cold War settled uneasily here. In 1959, Norwegian wrestlers and soccer players sailed a fishing boat into forbidden Soviet waters, intent on competing against their brethren in Murmansk, a voyage of sporting and diplomatic moxie made into a film, From Vardø With Love. That same year, an agreement between Norway, the Soviet Union and Finland paved the way for the creation of hydro dams on the Pasvik River, a construction project that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev himself came to visit.

The fall of the Iron Curtain opened new avenues for amity and profit. In 1993, the Barents Secretariat began operation with a goal to support Norwegian-Russian co-operation. Marriage created families that spanned the border.

In the Russian border town of Nikel, people began to study Norwegian. A university similarly offered Russian language instruction in Kirkenes, a town of 10,000 that has played host to visits from Russian dignitaries including foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and former president Dmitry Medvedev.

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On the ice, the Barents Hockey League gave Norwegian amateurs a chance to slap pucks and drink beer with their more skilled counterparts to the east. “Playing against Russia is like playing against Canada,” said Guro Brandshaug, a player on the Puckers, a Kirkenes team whose story was made into a television series by public broadcaster NRK. The team came to symbolize friendship through difficulty.

Norwegian authorities, meanwhile, spent years urging local businesses to “go east,” said Ms. Brandshaug. In Kirkenes, roughly 70 per cent of revenue at some port-related companies now depends on Russia.

“Why should we keep the borders open? Well because we are still very dependent on the financial part” of Russian business, she said.

But to close the border now would be to make an enemy of a people who are, in Kirkenes, friends and classmates. Nine of the 21 students in Ms. Brandshaug’s daughter’s class have Russian relations. Some of their parents openly support Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Puckers youth program recently added 10 new child players: five Russians, five Ukrainian refugees.

“We have to balance our political resistance against Putin with meeting each other as humans to have a good society for our children to live in,” Ms. Brandshaug said. She says maintaining ties can keep Russians in contact with Western values. “And for me, that is the only small hope we have for a better world, for a better Russia.”

Shut off Russia and “you do Putin a big favour,” said Willy Bangsund, a local wrestling icon who has fought to bring school-aged Russians into Norway for competition. The alternative is for “these children grow up in isolation. And then they hate.” Leaving the border open has also provided an escape valve for Russians fleeing enlistment to fight in Ukraine. “I would say it’s in our interest to give these people a way out,” said Lars Georg Fordal, head of the Norwegian Barents Secretariat.

Since the war on Ukraine, Kirkenes has become home to a small group of Russians no longer able to do their work at home. Some are journalists now working for the Independent Barents Observer, whose editor Thomas Nilsen was blacklisted from Russia in 2017.

“Kirkenes is a laboratory in Russia-Europe relations,” he said. For most Norwegians, “closing the border is against our values,” he said. “We’re a democracy.” The Independent Barents Observer still publishes in Russian. But Mr. Nilsen also worries that the war on Ukraine has produced, in Norway, a “collective Stockholm syndrome” that has resulted in a difficulty reckoning with the new Russian reality.

There is reason, he notes, to question the open entry point to Europe for Russians, pointing to a British-Russian man arrested for flying a drone in Svalbard, Norway, and the theft of Swedish road camera systems that appear to have found their way into Ukraine. In Kirkenes, dozens of Russian ship crews come and go from fishing vessels, and it’s not possible to adequately monitor what they are doing. “These boats pose a possible open door for smuggling technology out of Europe to Russia,” he said.

Threat assessments show a rising risk to the region, said Ellen Katrine Hætta, the chief of police in the broader Finnmark region. She pointed to “the willingness of Russians to take risks they haven’t needed to take before. For instance, espionage.” Norwegian police in the area continue to co-operate with the FSB, the Russian security service. But Russia continues to regularly jam GPS signals in the region. And the illegal entry into Norway of Andrei Medvedev, a defector from the Wagner mercenary group, has added to local concern “about who might come from Russia,” Ms. Hætta said.

“The Cold War never ended here,” she said. Other European countries have blocked off Russia. “So I don’t quite understand why this border should be open,” she said.

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The port offers one counter-argument. Part of the reason Russian fishing vessels continue to be welcome is a long-standing co-operation on management of the cod, whose nursery grounds are in Russian waters. To protect that, Russians have long been allowed to fish in Norwegian territory. If they “start fishing in their own zone, they fish the small fish and they ruin the stock,” said Mr. Jørgensen, the harbourmaster. He calls the Barents Sea “the kitchen of Europe. We have to take care of it.”

Still, the port has begun looking at alternatives, knowing a policy change in Oslo could at a moment’s notice erase its Russian business. The most promising option involves wooing another authoritarian state. Kirkenes, Mr. Jørgensen says, could with some additional investment become an off-loading destination for European cargo carried through the Northern Sea Route by vessels from China.

Kirkenes “could be the new Singapore,” suggests former mayor Rune Rafaelsen, whose enthusiasm for Russia once had few local equals. In 2018, he lobbied for Mr. Putin to visit Kirkenes. Two years later, he was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship. But he mailed that medal back within days of last year’s Feb. 24 Russian attack on Ukraine and now says the time has come for northern Norway to focus on neighbours like Finland. Better to forget about Russia for years to come. “We should block everything with them now,” he said.

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Others, too, have lost faith. Trond Hansen was among the small group of people in Kirkenes who learned Russian in the late 1980s. He became the principal of the local high school and helped to build an Arctic skills program that allowed students in Russia and northern Scandinavia to travel to each other’s countries to compete.

Russia has now been cut from the program, but “the Russian attitude toward us is also changing. I don’t think they want us to come,” Mr. Hansen said. He remains in close contact with educators there and has watched war on Ukraine change Russian society and schools. “It would be very difficult for us to come to Murmansk and meet young people in paramilitary uniforms standing in the morning, having ceremonies and singing patriotic songs,” he said.

The change has brought him sadness and disappointment. “From my personal point of view,” he said, “there is no sense in keeping the borders open for the time being.”

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