The Arctic camp where troops are training for war with Russia

CAMP VIKING, Norway — In the deep snow of the Arctic mountains, Britain’s Royal Marines are readying for war with Russia. The elite troops are introduced to the wilderness by camping in the snow in temperatures below minus 20C. They finish by jumping through ice holes and shouting their name, rank and number before they can be pulled out of the water. Then they roll in the snow, drink a tot of rum, and toast King Charles III. Britain’s extreme weather training in this area dates to the Cold War, but Camp Viking — its facility in Skjold, northern Norway — is new and growing. It opened in 2023 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is due to reach a peak of 1,500 personnel this spring, followed by 2,000 next year. Britain is “effectively doubling” the number of its Royal Marines in Norway over three years, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told POLITICO in an interview. Advertisement Exercises mirror missions the troops would conduct if NATO’s Article 5 on collective defense was triggered — reflecting the reality that “we are no longer at peace,” Brigadier Jaimie Norman, commander of the U.K. Commando Forces, told Cooper and her Norwegian counterpart Espen Barth Eide on a visit to the site Thursday. “We see ourselves on a continuum that has war on one end to peace on the other, and we are somewhere on that continuum.” Yet this is only one hemisphere of the Arctic. On the other, U.S. President Donald Trump is stoking a very different crisis by pushing for ownership of Greenland. The risks that link the two regions — which have shipping lanes busier than ever with Russian and Chinese vessels as the polar ice caps melt — are similar, albeit less immediate for Greenland than Norway. Yet Greenland is consuming huge global bandwidth. It is little wonder that Eide, greeting Cooper after he spent two days in Ukraine, lamented that they could not focus more on Ukraine and “less on other things.” Trump has left them with no other choice. Fire up the ‘Arctic Sentry’ Cooper and Eide’s response is to publicly back the idea of an “Arctic Sentry” NATO mission , a military co-operation that would aim to counter Russian threats — while reassuring Trump of Europe’s commitment to the region. Advertisement Details of the mission — including the number of troops it would involve and whether it would comprise land, sea or air deployments — remain hazy. It could mean that exercises like those in northern Norway are deployed in Greenland too, as well as the shipping lanes around them. Lanes in northern Europe have seen a rise in shadow fleets carrying sanctioned oil and alleged sabotage of communications cables. Yvette Cooper’s message to Trump, and everyone else, was to insist there is no real division between the eastern and western Arctic. | Stefan Rousseau/Getty Images But as with so many issues, they have yet to discover whether Trump will take heed. Cooper’s intervention came one day...

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