The Northern Sea Route: Aren’t Expectations Too High?

The climatic fluctuations of recent decades and the processes of deglaciation in the Arctic zone have caused a wave of increased interest in the Northern Sea Route. Some authors associate it with the future of world transport; others consider it only a grandiose design. Among the obvious advantages of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) are a reduction in the length of existing routes to Europe and, as a result, a reduction in transport costs, ensuring better preservation of perishable goods, and improving the safety of ships due to the absence of maritime piracy and the refusal to maintain security fleets. The main emphasis in the article is on the less deeply analyzed shipping risk factors in the literature related to the ice situation and shallow waters of the Arctic seas, the unsatisfactory state of navigation support for ports, and their insufficiency to ensure large-scale flows of commercial shipping, with aggravated geopolitical conflicts, legislative obstacles, as well as the possible negative impact of the commercialization of NSR on the ecological environment. It is noted that the fate of the Northern Sea Route, in one way or another, is connected with the answers to the following difficult questions: How to interpret the ideas of “justified” and “unreasonable” internationalization of the Arctic? Will a vast deep-sea region of the seabed appear in the central basin of the Northern Ocean as part of the navigable space? Does the Arctic need a comprehensive regime regulating the activities of states, following the example of the Antarctic Treaty? What is the optimal balance between national, regional, and broader international regulation of cooperation between states and their activities in the region, etc.? The threat of a strong depreciation of Russia’s efforts to modernize the shipping route due to sanction restrictions, especially due to the Western countries imposed on Russia in 2022, is emphasized. In this regard, the authors see a real chance in the implementation of the NSR project in a “truncated” version in the cooperation of the efforts of Russia and China.