Human Security Centre Human Rights and International Security Research

Amid a host of promises including a declaration to re-join the Paris Climate Agreement, the Biden administration announced in early January that it would seek an extension to the treaty, and on the 26th Biden and Putin agreed via a telephone conversation to a five-year extension.

The warming of relations between Russia and China in the Arctic has driven some Western policymakers to declare that an ‘Arctic Alliance’ has formed between the two powers. However, a deeper examination of the evidence indicates that a destabilising partnership between the two powers is far from apparent.

While Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have sought to pull themselves out of Russia’s orbit and entrench themselves as Western, European states, Moscow has sought to influence and destabilise this process.

Anti-corruption campaigner and leading Russian political oppositionist Alexei Navalny has been poisoned with the nerve agent ‘Novichok’. With the international community now demanding a full and transparent enquiry into the incident, it appears that this is yet another sign that the Kremlin’s grisly method of dealing with dissidents has indeed become an intrinsic facet of state policy in Russia.

The Government’s tepid response to the Russia Report is unlikely to have made any in the Kremlin lose much sleep. A stronger effort is therefore imperative to deter any future attempts to undermine UK democracy.

While the plot may have turned out to be a complete fabrication, the fear and panic inspired by the initial reports serve as a reminder that mokroye delo - wet affairs or “wetwork” in the West - has seen a resurgence under Vladimir Putin.

Any hopes of an alternate course for Russia have surely been dashed by the constitutional overhaul and it appears that the future will hold significantly more continuity than change for the country both internally and externally.

The Belarus-Russia integration process has been put on hold indefinitely and with relations between the two states entering a more pragmatic phase, Lukashenko will likely enhance his efforts to build further bridges between Belarus and the West.

While it is unlikely that Zelenskiy or Putin will have softened on their positions regarding the Ukrainian border and the election timeline, the Paris summit has re-opened the peace dialogue and de-escalated tensions between the two states.

The Arctic has long been a space of stability and of healthy inter-governmental collaboration. It is vital that this stability endures and the status quo persists to preserve the region and ensure its stable development.