The Tip of the Iceberg

Introduction 

The partnership between Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Arctic, like the broader strategic relationship between Moscow and Beijing, has evolved significantly throughout the last decade and has reached unprecedented levels within the last year. The growing strategic alignment between the two countries has alarmed many analysts. Recent joint military and civil-military activities in the Arctic have been discussed as an indicator that Russia’s previous wariness of PRC global ambitions, its historic focus on exercising sovereign control over its Arctic territories, and its efforts to limit non-Arctic states’ access to the region may be dissipating as it seeks to compensate for its strategic vulnerabilities since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

Several high-visibility developments—including a joint naval patrol near the Aleutian Islands in August 2023 and the signing of a Russia-PRC Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on maritime law enforcement along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) in April 2023—can be viewed as potential turning points in the Sino-Russian relationship in the Arctic. In April 2024, the Russian and Chinese navies signed an additional MoU on naval search and rescue cooperation “on the high seas".¹ Earlier in the month, Russia also invited the BRICS countries to “test their equipment” during Arctic exercises in 2025.² These actions demonstrate growing efforts on Moscow’s part to collaborate with non-Western actors amid heightened geopolitical competition in the Arctic.  

While these announcements are significant, their implementation will likely be uneven. Less publicized incremental activities that take place under the cover of civil efforts, though harder to track, may be of greater importance. Of particular concern are joint efforts that support defense-industrial development, dual-use infrastructure development that has the potential to support military operations, and commercial vessel transits that can be exploited to gather situational awareness and threaten NATO allies’ assets. Moscow’s and Beijing’s autocratic governance and the focus on dual-use technologies and hybrid activities, accelerated by the war in Ukraine, make clear delineation between civil and military activities highly challenging. This is especially clear in the case of the PRC, whose explicit Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) development strategy presupposes that all civil activities may support military ambitions and defense-industrial development.  

The growing Russia-PRC partnership in the Arctic encompasses technological collaboration on space-based technologies that enable positioning, navigation, and communication, and scientific research that facilitates the development of undersea technologies. Because these civil efforts have dual-use applications, this paper will take a closer look at Sino-Russian civilmilitary collaboration in the Arctic by outlining the most noteworthy efforts supporting the broader strategic aims of the two countries. This paper is the third in a series investigating Russia’s and the PRC’s growing alignment in the Arctic in areas that have potential military applications. The analysis relies on open-source government documents and expert views, including anonymized interviews with leading experts and officials from North America and Northern Europe.