How NATO Is Countering Russia in the Arctic

Braced against cutting winds slicing through the Keflavík air base, one of the U.K.’s most advanced stealth fighter jets sits on the tarmac, having just arrived in Iceland.

Huddled meters away from the British Royal Air Force (RAF) F-35B aircraft, Iceland’s foreign minister does not hesitate to agree that the Arctic, just north of the Nordic country, is a vitally important area.

“We very much hope that it will continue to be a region of low tension,” Thórdís Kolbrún Reykfjörd Gylfadóttir told Newsweek. “But things are changing, and we have to be vigilant.”

This is why the U.K. has sent four F-35B fighter aircraft from the country’s 617 Squadron to the southwestern tip of Iceland, the jets just getting started with a NATO air policing mission focusing on the Arctic.

It is the first time that London’s F-35B stealth fighters have taken on air policing for NATO, although other RAF jets have just rounded off several months of monitoring the alliance’s eastern flank from Romania.

The radar-absorbent fifth-generation fast jets are designed to be hard to detect by radar, with the F-35B model is able to land vertically and take off from very short distances.

Standing by the sleek jet, Wing Commander Stewart Campbell, who heads up 617 Squadron, described the F-35s as able to “speak to each other.” When used together, he said, the connection between the jets serves up a “huge advantage over what we’ve seen in NATO before.”

The NATO of 2024 is not just monitoring Eastern Europe—it is keeping a careful eye on hotspots across the globe, from lobbying for de-escalation in the Middle East to doubling down on its Indo-Pacific presence.

There is an increasing sense that NATO is also homing in on the inhospitable Arctic, dragging its attention north as Russia quietly builds up its presence in region, and China looks on with piqued interest.

“This latest air policing mission in Iceland displays the U.K.’s ability to operate and deter our adversaries across the alliance’s airspace,” British armed forces minister, Luke Pollard, said in a statement.

The alliance has a firm grip on the Arctic region—the vast majority of the nations bracketing the Arctic are NATO members, boosted by Finland and Sweden stepping into the alliance after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

The impression is certainly one of NATO solidarity in Iceland’s Keflavík, just under an hour from the national capital, Reykjavík. The alliance’s members have repeatedly said the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine has forged tighter bonds than ever before, an attitude reflected on the sprawling Keflavík air base.

The F-35Bs’ presence in Keflavík “is a really practical demonstration of the unity of NATO,” said RAF Group 11’s commander, Air Vice-Marshal Tom Burke.

“We have a real interest in ensuring very much that it remains this area of high cooperation and low tension,” Dr. Bryony Mathew, the British Ambassador to Iceland, told Newsweek.

“Iceland continues to be strategically important because of its location, and that definitely does not change when you when you look at the foreseeable changes in the High North, both because of climate and also the security situation,” Gylfadóttir said.

Climate change is reshaping the Arctic, opening it up to more traffic and spikes of activity in a previously hard-to-access region.

Environmental morphing comes hand-in-hand, though, with the withering of relations between Russia and Western nations after Moscow’s troops crossed over into Ukraine nearly two and a half years ago.

Russia, although taking painful blows in Ukraine, has the largest military presence in the region of all the Arctic nations and is an “acute threat,” the U.S. has assessed. Moscow is busy reopening a number of its Cold War-era facilities, many of which are designed for reconnaissance and surveillance, Mark Cancian, a retired U.S. Marine Corps Reserve colonel and a senior adviser with the U.S. think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, previously told Newsweek.

The Kremlin may be tied up in Eastern Europe, but Russia has capabilities not currently being utilized in and around Ukraine that could be deployed in the Arctic, Gylfadóttir said.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 created a “new reality,” she added, saying NATO countries must adapt to these altered conditions.

Added into this mix is Beijing. The Pentagon said last month that China, although not an Arctic state, is dipping its toes further into the region, seeing “greater influence” and access.

“We can see their increased interest in the region,” said Gylfadóttir.

NATO air policing constantly covers a handful of regions, including the Baltic states and the eastern flank of Europe. Air policing missions coordinated from Keflavík, however, come in shorter, rotating stints typically lasting a few weeks with jets from contributing NATO nations.

Both Iceland and the U.K. are part of the Joint Expeditionary Force—or JEF—molded by NATO to be a flexible option when it comes to security in northern Europe.

But another part of the alliance’s strategy for protecting the Arctic, said Mathew, is predicting what the region will soon look like through the likes of new scientific studies.

“Forecasting depends on knowledge, it depends on science—so we are doing as much as we can to really try and understand the region, to enable us to predict what the future might look like for the Arctic,” she said.