In a tiny Arctic village in Norway, Russians and Ukrainians keep an uneasy peace

BARENTSBURG, Norway—The Russian tour guide welcomes me with just a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“We were desperately waiting for you all day long.”

It’s nearing midnight, but the tiny Arctic town is golden under the June sun.

Smoke billows from the nearby mine, casting a shadow over the surrounding turquoise Grønfjord, which in turn spills into mountains that are beginning to shed their snow with the early signs of summer.

The guide is Natalia Maksimishina, a young, blue-eyed scholar in Russian Arctic history. And I am the town’s only overnight visitor.

I’ve come to Barentsburg, a Russian coal mining settlement on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.

The words “peace to the world,” adorned on the mountain above, might seem ironic in wartime, but here in Barentsburg, where Russians and Ukrainians have worked alongside each other for a century, the atmosphere is eerily peaceful. Though in this unexpected oasis, tensions from a war waged thousands of kilometres away bubble beneath the surface.

Maksimishina says when Russian rocket strikes first hit Kyiv on Feb. 24, the community’s reaction was “basically absent.” People here rarely talk politics, she tells me, and they always stop before things get heated. “As soon as it gets uncomfortable, they just switch the topic.”

The congeniality is, at least in part, circumstantial. Far from many of the luxuries of modern life — such as fresh food, at least in between bimonthly shipments from Russia — in a land where polar bears roam and darkness descends for four months of the year, getting along with your neighbours has long been essential to survival.

Barentsburg is the second largest settlement on Svalbard — 1,000 kilometres shy of the North Pole.

Once home to more than 1,000 people, Barentsburg’s population has whittled down to about 300, two-thirds of them Ukrainian, most from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, which historically have had close ties to Russia.

A 1920 treaty designates Svalbard as Norway’s, but gives signatories equal rights to access, fish, hunt and mine here. Moscow has historically operated several mines on Svalbard, though Barentsburg is the only active one. A second, Pyramiden, was abandoned after the fall of the Soviet Union, and is now marketed to tourists as a “ghost town.” Russian state-run company Trust Arktikugol owns and operates both towns and employs most of the people in them.

Tourists have largely drained from Barentsburg since the war, thanks to a call by Svalbard’s main tourism board for its members to boycott Russian businesses. Planning an overnight trip here required contacting two separate companies offering the few day trips to Barentsburg from the archipelago’s capital of Longyearbyen, and organizing for one to drop me off and the other to pick me up.

On our midnight stroll, Maksimishina is frank and approachable, her voice high and upbeat. She jokes about not being able to buy a new set of underwear since Russian bank cards no longer work in Norway, a NATO member, but is quick to mention it’s a small price to pay for what Ukrainians are facing. That night, I am the only guest in the local hotel of about 50 rooms.

The next morning over coffee, Barbara Mokshtadt, another Russian guide, says she does not support the invasion, but that she tries not to discuss it with her neighbours.

One of her colleagues is pro-war, she says, but “for me, it is more important that we are friends, now, here, without talking about mine or his position.”

Behind the cash register in the town’s gift shop, Marina, a Ukrainian from Luhansk, tears up as she tells me about the home her family built, now reduced to rubble. (Marina asks me to keep her last name private since she works for a Russian company and could face retribution for speaking out.)

Speaking in Russian through a translator, Marina says she doesn’t view Russia, which invaded Ukraine in February, as an aggressor, and supports people on both sides. While her family in Luhansk, which has been controlled by Russia-backed separatists since 2014, agrees with Russia’s actions, her husband’s family, also in Ukraine, is against the invasion.

When pressed to clarify her position on the war, Marina says, “There is politics outside the settlement on the mainland, and here we live like a big family, all together.”

But everything about Russia’s presence on Svalbard, which is located strategically between the Barents, Greenland and Norwegian seas, is political.

Steps away, in a gated, burgundy building, lives Sergey Gushchin, the bearded, ponytailed consul general — Moscow’s eyes and ears in Barentsburg.

Gushchin has been spreading the Kremlin’s war message in the Arctic, in April dismissing photos of Russian destruction in Ukraine as staged to Norwegian online newspaper, Nettavisen.

When I walk up to the consulate and ring the doorbell, I see Gushchin in the foyer but he quickly makes himself scarce while an aide explains he is too busy for an interview.

Timofey Rogozhin, Russia’s one-time head of tourism in Barentsburg, tells me later that Gushchin could be a factor in Barentsburg’s apparent peacefulness.

Rogozhin says he was forced out of the top tourism job last spring for criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin on social media. Since the war broke out, Rogozhin believes about 100 Ukrainians who do not agree with the war have left the settlement.

One Russian in Barentsburg who asked to remain anonymous, fearing they could lose their job, said Trust Arktikugol managers told employees not to speak about the war online. Then, after thinking for a second, the Russian said, actually, if the posts are pro-Russia it’s probably OK.

The town pub is shut most days, suffering from a lack of clientele because of sanctions affecting Russian bank cards.

Sometimes, locals say, a Ukrainian friend will pick up the tab.

As I sail back to Longyearbyen, it is this image that sticks with me. With the war in Ukraine dividing the world’s powers, in this tiny Arctic village, a Ukrainian buys a round of drinks for their Russian neighbours.

Lex Harvey is a Toronto-based transportation reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @lexharvs