Date: Wednesday 12 March | Location: Online Webinar | Time: 14:00 – 15:00 (UTC)

Early signs of the new US policy toward Russia — including driving down global energy costs and applying further sanctions — will be felt directly by the Kremlin in the Arctic. Massive LNG projects such as Novatek LNG — on the Yamal Peninsula where China is still an investor, and which was designed to feed NE Asian markets — are now being severely sanctioned. This is intended to both deny Russia the world’s biggest LNG market and undermine the Sino-Russian strategic relationship in the Arctic and Northern Hemisphere.

To do so Washington also seeks to:

• undermine Beijing’s economic case for developing the Northern Sea Route linking Asia with the EU; and
• disrupt China’s attempts to use IoT instruments to assert political governance and influence over the region from ungoverned space, instead of via terrestrial regional forums such as the Arctic Council.

The webinar will therefore cover:

• NATO's impact on the Arctic;
• The arrival of the BRICS in the region;
• The implications of confining China and now Russia in the Pacific Arctic;
• Hybrid sub-threshold level warfare throughout the emerging Eurasian Arctic;
• The instrumentalisation of climate frameworks for geopolitical ends;
• The morphing of the Sino-Russian relationship from a geoeconomic partnership in the Arctic to a strategic alliance in space.

Speaker

Dr Tim Reilly is an adviser to the Cabinet Office, FCO, and MoD on Arctic matters. He has been: an expert witness to various House of Lords/Commons' Arctic Committees; and an Adviser to the 2-Star Commander of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), a multinational force responsible for the High North. Tim now works with US Space Force on Arctic-related matters, and at Norway’s University of the North in Tromso. He remains an Institute Associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge, where he took his PhD in Sino-Russian Geoeconomic Relations in the Arctic. He frequently appears in the written and broadcast media. Tim is a former Parachute Regiment officer and Russian speaker who trained in International Relations. He has worked for Shell as a government affairs adviser on Russia, as well as ExxonMobil and JKX Oil & Gas on Ukraine and the Caucasus. He now runs his own Arctic/Polar Consultancy.