No, Russia is not building a new Arctic military base on American land: Commentary
The ‘National Interest’ resuscitates a fringe 1980s conspiracy theory on Wrangel Island
This is a reproduction of an article that first appeared on 66° North. If you would like to read more posts by Lukas Wahden, you can sign up for his blog on Substack here.
On September 3, Brandon J. Weichert published the article “Russia Is Quietly Building a New Arctic Military Base—on American Land” in the National Interest. The piece quickly proliferated across national security platforms, and was republished in a modified version by Arctic Today.
Mr Weichert’s essay recycles decade-old reports about Russian military facilities on Wrangel Island and inflates them into a supposedly new threat. By presenting these facilities as something novel, Mr Weichert manufactures a sense of urgency to justify reviving an alleged U.S. claim to the island. In doing so, he distorts both the history and the legal realities of that claim, echoing a long-running conspiracy theory promoted by fringe groups – one that successive American administrations of both parties have consistently dismissed.
Several of the claims made by Mr Weichert in his article are inaccurate. His essay misquotes source materials, contains demonstrable falsehoods and violates basic standards of journalistic and academic integrity.
If implemented, Mr Weichert’s recommendation for the U.S. to assert a territorial claim on Wrangel Island would further undermine the complex, yet robust territorial and maritime sovereignty regimes of the Arctic. Instead of challenging Russia’s imperialist pretensions and militarisation of the Arctic, a U.S. territorial claim on Wrangel Island would essentially replicate the Russian behaviours decried in Mr Weichert’s article.
A ‘new’ Russian base?
The headline to Mr Weichert’s article states that Russia is “quietly” building a “new” base on Wrangel. Both of these claims are misleading. The Russian military base in question, Ushakovskoye (Ушаковское), has been in place for more than a decade. It was established as an expansion to a border guard post in 2014, as is acknowledged in this High North News article referenced by Mr Weichert’s piece. The Sopka-2 radar system mentioned by Mr Weichert was set up in 2016, and has been an acknowledged and widely known feature of military installations on Wrangel Island for ten years. Russian media outlets have been reporting on the system since 2014. These reports were reviewed for an English-speaking audience by Sergey Sukhanin in a 2020 piece, which is also referenced in Mr Weichert’s article.
Arctic security experts have also extensively discussed the rule of Ushakovskoye for close to a decade, as part of Russia’s 2007-2015 remilitarisation of its Arctic territories, which included the establishment and modernisation of military bases. Nowhere in Mr Weichert’s text is his claim of a “new” base on Wrangel, or even any planned expansions or modifications of the existing base, substantiated by appropriate references or additional information.
UNCLOS, the Baker-Shevardnatse line, and the 1980s debate on Wrangel Island
But Mr Weichert’s article also understates, and at times misrepresents, the legal and historical complexities underlying historical disputes over Wrangel Island. Sovereignty rights over the island have been subject to a long and inconclusive scholarly debate. The only reference to this literature provided by Mr Weichert is an 1981 paper constructing a case for a U.S. claim, which presents a 1881 U.S. Coast Guard landing on Wrangel Island as grounds for an assertion of U.S. sovereignty.
But prior to the early 1980s, the time of publication of the paper in question, the American public was still largely indifferent to the fate of Wrangel Island. Debates around a potential claim only heated up when the U.S. State Department entered into the first round of preparatory negotiations over an official delineation agreement for the maritime boundary between Alaska and the USSR in 1981. Before then, the international legal basis for the boundary had been the 1867 “United States-Russia Convention providing for the U.S. purchase of Alaska”. The original maps of this 1867 agreement had by 1981 been lost by both sides, however. During most of the Cold War, the U.S. and USSR saw no need to negotiate precise delimitations between the sparsely populated and militarised islands around the Bering Strait.
The looming entry into force of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982 – and its provisions for extraction rights awarded within 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zones – made it necessary for Washington and Moscow to hash out a modern, and more sophisticated, agreement on a shared maritime boundary. As a technical matter, these negotiations were entrusted to professionals in the U.S. State Department. Anticipating the likely Soviet position, the State Department decided to base its negotiating position on the rough demarcation lines inherited from the 1867 agreement, excluding Wrangel and four other historically disputed islands occupied by the USSR.
A conspiracy theory that won’t succumb
This decision by the U.S. government inspired the resistance of Carl Olson, a teacher from Los Angeles, and Mark Seidenberg, an employee of the U.S. Agriculture Department. Seidenberg had been friends with the Alaskan businessman Carl Lomen, who had attempted to purchase Wrangel Island in 1924, and sought reparations for the “loss” of the island to the USSR until his death in 1965.
Olson and Seidenberg were convinced that the U.S. held a valid legal claim to the island, and that Washington was about to surrender oil and gas deposits worth billions of dollars to the USSR, should a maritime boundary agreement be signed. The two men partnered to found the NGO “State Department Watch”, which organised its members to lobby high-ranking politicians to challenge the State Department’s executive authority on the issue. Olson also claimed that Wrangel Island harboured a gigantic, secret Soviet prison, in which he believed the Swedish wartime hero Raoul Wallenberg had been imprisoned, a claim that was never substantiated after the fall of the USSR.
The Reagan administration responded to requests and letters by Olson and Seidenberg, as well as “State Department Watch”, on multiple occasions. The Reagan Presidential Library holds a collection of the exchanges, as well as relevant articles published in the U.S. media at the time. In 1988, the National Security Council prepared a dedicated Fact Sheet for “State Department Watch”. In the Fact Sheet, U.S. diplomats described the American government position as follows:
“Allegations that the United States is engaged in a “give-away” of [Wrangel and other islands] are unfounded. Each of the islands was formally claimed by Russia in 1916 and by the U.S.S.R. in 1924 and 1926. Wrangel, the largest, has been occupied by the Soviets since 1924. Extensive research has produced no evidence of U.S. protests of the Russian or Soviet claims to the islands or of the Soviets’ occupation of Wrangel since 1924. Although American citizens were involved in the discovery and exploration of several of the islands and attempted to claim them for the United States — and despite the listing of several of the islands in some early publications such as the U.S. Geological Survey’ s 1906 Dictionary of Alaska — there is no evidence that the Government of the United States ever formally asserted a claim to any of these islands.”
The Fact Sheet also argued, correctly, that “under international law, mere discovery is not sufficient to establish a right to sovereignty”, and pointed out that “[…] to establish definitive territorial sovereignty, discovery must be combined with effective occupation by which the claimant nation exercises the actual, continuous, and peaceful display of the functions of a state over the territory.” The U.S. never exercised effective control over Wrangel Island, and therefore never established a legal basis for later sovereignty claims.
Undeterred, Olson and Seidenberg continued to contradict the official U.S. government position, at least until “State Department Watch” seized its operations around the time of Olson’s passing in 2015. The conspiracy theory of a “giveaway of Arctic islands” briefly resurfaced in 2012, when it was peddled by the Republican Texas House candidate Wes Riddle as potential grounds for an impeachment of Barack Obama. In the same year, a Republican U.S. Senate nominee, Joe Miller, also proliferated the theory in an article. Miller later acknowledged having written the piece with the assistance of “State Department Watch.”
But from the official American point of view, the U.S. has never staked a claim to Wrangel Island. Russian sovereign control over the island was, moreover, solidified de facto in the 1991 Baker-Shevardnatse line agreement, which established a maritime boundary between the U.S. and Russian Federation.
Legal arguments over Russia’s sovereignty over Wrangel Island may want to address not the fictional past U.S. claims, but the ongoing lack of approval of the agreement by the Russian Duma. While fringe voices in Russia have criticised the Baker-Shevardnatse agreement for “giving away Russian lands to the United States”, the Russian government provisionally applies the agreement and has defended it publicly, for the last time in 2024. Mr Weichert’s decision to root his argument for the “validity” of a U.S. claim on Wrangel Island not in these considerations – but in false assertions long disputed by the U.S. government – should be viewed as an effective restatement of Olson’s and Seidenberg’s conspiracy theory.
American land?
Mr Weichert’s arguments are not only flawed in a legal sense, however. His article also misrepresents the history of explorations, attempts at settlements, and political claims to the island. In particular, Mr Weichert distorts the chaotic history of attempts by the Canadian explorer Vihjalmur Stefansson to explore and claim Wrangel Island in the first two decades of the 20th century.
In 1914, Stefansson had organised a maverick expedition to Wrangel and other Siberian islands with the goal to claim them for Canada. The operation turned into an unabashed disaster. Stefansson’s flagship, the Karluk, was crushed by the treacherous waves of the East Siberian Sea. Survivors of the expedition made it to Wrangel Island, where they survived until being rescued by two American vessels. When Stefansson resolved to relaunch his mission to colonise Wrangel Island in 1921, Canada refused to fund it in light of Stefansson’s prior incompetence. Stefansson remained stubborn, and raised his own funds to dispatch four young men and a young Inuit woman to the island.
Mr Weichert writes about this doomed adventure that “America’s claim on [Wrangel] island was bolstered by American expeditions to the island, including Vihjalmur Stefansson’s 1921 venture, which established a provisional government and raised the US flag.” This statement is demonstrably false. Firstly, the 1962 New York Times obituary referenced by Mr Weichert makes no mention of the planting of a U.S. flag by Stefansson’s 1921 expedition. That is because no such planting occurred at that time. The flag raised in 1921 by Stefansson was that of the British Empire, an instance in response to which the American State Department issued the following protest statement: “Wrangel Island, claimed by the explorer Stefansson for Canada, is in reality the property of Russia.” And even the British government, whose flag had been raised by Stefansson’s crew, protested the action, keen to avoid an international incident with Russia.
And secondly, nothing resembling a “provisional government” was established on Wrangel Island in 1921. Out of the five members of the second crew dispatched by Stefansson, only Ada Blackjack, the Inuit woman, survived. To rescue her, Stefansson again raised funds from private British donors to dispatch a mission to Wrangel Island in 1923. The ship collected the lone survivor, and in turn left twelve Alaskan Inuit and one white U.S. person behind on the island. Outraged by the settlement, Moscow dispatched a gunboat to Wrangel in 1924, arrested the settlers, and deported them to the USSR.
Mr Weichert decries this expulsion by the Soviets of “American and British settlers” on the island as an “illegal act of aggression”, but without mentioning the facts that the U.S. and British governments did not recognise the settlement as theirs at the time, and that the presence of the settlers had been sponsored by private individuals from Canada and Britain. The Americans in question, and in particular the Alaskan Inuit, were further also abandoned by the U.S. government after their abduction to prisons in the USSR. The U.S. didn’t deem it necessary to provide funds for the repatriation of imprisoned indigenous folks, none of which it recognised as U.S. citizens. It relied instead on the Red Cross to do so.
To recover the costs of his doomed missions, Stefansson eventually resolved to try and “sell” Wrangel Island. He offered it first to the Canadian government, which ignored the offer, and then to the United States government, which also did not respond. Stefansson was given the cold shoulder by both governments because he was in no position to sell Wrangel, as the island was not his personal property. Nonetheless, the Alaskan businessman and reindeer magnate Carl Lomen eventually agreed to “buy” the island off Stefansson. Unable to convince the U.S. government to assert his “property claim” against Russia, Lomen eventually tried to gift Wrangel Island to his friend, Mark Seidenberg, before his death. Seidenberg, in turn, went on to co-found “State Department Watch” following Lomen’s death, and constructed the conspiracy theory that is now being resuscitated by Mr Weichert.
Time to bury the Wrangel Island dispute
There are therefore no historical or legal grounds for Mr Weichert’s argument, which instead represents the woeful continuation of a longstanding conspiracy theory rooted in a private U.S. citizen’s efforts to establish property rights over Wrangel Island.
As has been pointed out regularly by the State Department since 1988, neither Stefansson’s explorations, nor the U.S. geographical explorations that preceded it, ever sufficed as a legal basis for an American sovereignty claim. This is in spite of Mr Weichert’s assertion that such a claim exists and is “[…] valid, unextinguished by time or acquiescence.” Ironically, Mr Weichert backs up this statement with a reference to a 2003 State Department Fact Sheet, which states clearly that Wrangel Island has “never been claimed by the United States.”
It is difficult to determine the degree to which the conspiracy theory created by “State Department Watch” has shaped perceptions of Wrangel Island among the American public. But for context, here is an excerpt from a 1967 article by the U.S. Naval Institute, which illustrates how U.S. military analysts viewed the 1924 Soviet takeover of the island before the debates of the 1980s:
“In 1921, Canada had tried to colonize Wrangel Island in the East Siberian Sea, with Canadian Eskimos, but they had died of starvation on the 2,000-square-mile island. In 1923, new attempts to colonize were made by the Canadians. Canada claimed sovereignty over the island in 1924. The Soviet Union responded quickly by (1) informing Canada that the Czar’s 1916 decree remained very much in force, and (2) dispatching an icebreaker from Vladivostok to Wrangel to evacuate the Canadian Eskimos and hoist the Soviet flag on the island. So ended the Wrangel dispute.”
It is high time for public discourse to return to a clearer understanding of Wrangel Island’s history and legal status and to lay to rest the conspiracy theory promoted by “State Department Watch” and recently revived by The National Interest. Russia holds sovereignty over the island; and even if that control were somehow questioned, any hypothetical U.S. claim would be weaker than those that could conceivably be advanced by either the United Kingdom or Canada. American public figures should therefore cease urging the U.S. government to assert a claim to Wrangel Island.
Such a decision would, of course, not be about appeasing the Russian government or accepting the militarisation of the Pacific Arctic. Russia has repeatedly spread conspiracy theories about Arctic sovereignty arrangements and proclaimed supposed “historical rights” over places that belong to others, such as Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. While not “illegal” in the strict sense, the Ushakovskoye base sits inside a UNESCO-protected nature reserve and breaches the spirit and procedural requirements of the World Heritage Convention, as Russia has failed to provide assessments of its environmental impact. The base also contributes to the militarisation of the entry point to the Northern Sea Route, which several countries, including the United States, do not recognise as Russian internal waters. These developments warrant criticism and, where appropriate, opposition.
But rather than fighting fire with fire, the United States would do better to issue an explicit confirmation that it does not claim Wrangel Island. Such a statement would strengthen the Arctic governance system and help preserve regional peace and stability in the region. The Arctic’s sovereignty landscape is complex yet remarkably effective: there are no unresolved territorial disputes, and maritime boundaries are typically settled peacefully. This framework has underpinned decades of stability. Neither Russia nor the United States should jeopardise it by resurrecting nineteenth- or twentieth-century claims to territory. Arctic lands may be remote, but they are not up for grabs – whether on Greenland, a U.S. ally, or on Wrangel Island, the territory of a U.S. adversary.
