Word: russianizing
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...aquatic assault on the North Pole. With the funding (and presence aboard) of a Swedish millionaire and an Australian adventure-tour operator, the expedition trailed an icebreaker to the pole, where Sagalevich piloted one of two submersibles to a depth of 13,100 ft. (4,301 m), planted the Russian flag and then skillfully resurfaced through the shifting holes in the ice. Chilingarov said the flag was to "stake the place for Russia," although, in truth, Russia is already a dominant force in the Arctic; it has the world's largest fleet of icebreakers and long experience developing...
Chilingarov and his team were given a heroes' reception in Moscow and an audience with President Vladimir Putin. But the Russians' adventurism also set off an irritable and predictable backlash. Canada's then Foreign Minister Peter MacKay dismissed the Russian effort as a "show." "This isn't the 15th century," he said. "You can't go around the world and just plant flags and say, ?We're claiming this territory.' " In Washington, Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation said, "Russia's attempted grab is a cause for concern" and called on the U.S. government to "formulate a strong response...
Sagalevich professes bafflement. "I don't really know why some people got so nervous about [our] placing the Russian flag there," he told TIME. "The Americans placed their flag on the moon, and it doesn't mean the moon became theirs." The Russian acknowledges that though the mission "excited the whole world," it amounted to only a "pinprick" in Moscow's continued efforts to undergird its case for extended sovereignty in the Arctic. (In 2002 a U.N. commission shelved Russia's claim to more of the Arctic for lack of detailed technical evidence.) Nor, despite this summer's bravado...
...event, it is hardly as if Russia were the only nation to see the Arctic as a place to burnish national pride. The Norwegians have their new gas field, and Denmark is pursuing proof of its own claims just as doggedly as the Russians - though in a more consensual, Scandinavian mode. The Danes enlisted both a Swedish and a Russian icebreaker for its expedition to the largely uncharted waters north of Greenland to document what Science Minister Helge Sander refers to as "our hopefully justified claim of a continental shelf from Greenland toward the North Pole." The Danes know that...
...icebreaker fleet Harper has promised, that's not much of a deterrent. In truth, of course, it isn't military encroachment the Canadians fear so much as the environmental peril that may come from unregulated use of their waters. Cruise ships transporting Arctic ecotourists, many of them Russian vessels hired out to Western tour operators, anchored off Resolute 17 times this year alone. Once the Northwest Passage becomes not just a tourist destination but a viable commercial route that would cut an astonishing 5,000 miles (8,000 km) from the distance between Asia and Europe through the Panama Canal...