Why are the Russians rushing to mine rare earths in the Arctic?

Moscow’s new “roadmap” towards independence from China and leverage with the U.S.

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.

Russia’s Anabarsky district straddles the northernmost edge of Siberia. Nestled against the Arctic flank of the Sakha Republic, the area is washed by the Laptev Sea, and crisscrossed by the Anabar, Uele and Udya rivers. Most of its 3,500 inhabitants live in the villages (selo) of Saskylakh, Ebelyakh and Yuryung-Khaya. All three were established by Moscow in the early 1930s as part of Stalin’s colonial subjugation of the Soviet Union’s northern peripheries. Determined to enforce officially sanctioned modes of nationhood, the Bolsheviks forcibly relocated camps of local reindeer herders, hunters and nomads — the Dolgans and Evenki — into permanent settlements, where Russian-language schooling and political loyalties could be more tightly controlled.

State violence is woven into both the identity and the institutional DNA of Anabar. The plight of the district’s communities is not a historical aberration. Today, Anabar’s population, still overwhelmingly non-Russian, once again sees its needs and way of life subordinated to the priorities of a distant autocratic centre. For one thing, Dolgan and Evenki males have been drafted into Russia’s invasion army at unsustainably high rates, fraying the already brittle social fabric of their home communities. Yet beyond the war in Ukraine, a longer-term development linked to Russia’s vision of its future national security now threatens to unsettle the delicate balance between Anabar’s people and their environment. Roughly one hundred kilometres to the east of Ebelyakh, in a location only accessible in the winter, lies the Tomtor field, one of the largest rare earth mineral deposits on the planet — and, as such, a future crown jewel of Russia’s state-driven extractivist project.

1. What’s the context for Russia’s rare earth mining “roadmap”?

On November 4, Vladimir Putin instructed his Cabinet of Ministers to compile a dedicated “roadmap” for the long-term development of rare earth and mineral mining and production in Russia. The order was published on the Kremlin website, tucked into the list of outcomes of this year’s Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok. In recent years, the EEF has morphed into a launchpad for Russian-led economic initiatives in East and Southeast Asia — now an economic lifeline for Moscow since the launch of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Preparations for the “roadmap” were assigned to the office of Russia’s Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin, with a deadline for December 1.

While not the first of its kind, the timing of the Kremlin’s announcement matters. Rare earths are a distinct and exceptionally valuable group of seventeen heavy metals. They are used to produce high-performance magnets, which in turn underpin the automotive, electronics, and defence sectors, and are equally indispensable for renewable energy technologies. Global demand for rare earths, as well as other metals deemed “critical” — lithium, nickel or copper, for instance — is projected to skyrocket. The journalist Guillaume Pitron estimates that humanity may need to “mine more metals over the next thirty years than over the last 70,000 years combined.” Rare earths are geologically abundant, but their refinement requires heavy chemical processing that produces toxic and radioactive waste. Refinement plants are capital-intensive and require decades-long commitments, which is typically only feasible for committed state actors.

China, the country with the world’s most abundant rare earth reserves, also holds a de facto monopoly on their refinement (91% of global output in 2024) thanks to decades of targeted state investment. Chinese leaders have long understood the strategic significance of their position. Warning of historical Western interventions in oil-rich Middle Eastern countries, Deng Xiaoping proclaimed during his 1992 Southern Tour in Inner Mongolia that “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths.”

The resulting geostrategic problem only began to be acknowledged by other states after China “unofficially” banned rare earths exports to Japan during a standoff over a 2010 boat collision incident near the Senkaku islands. Later, during several episodes of the U.S.-China trade war, Beijing placed sweeping export restrictions on rare earth elements to the U.S., forcing the Trump administration to blunt parts of its tariff-driven re-shoring agenda.

China’s coercive leverage has since pushed other states, and in particular the U.S., to seek out alternatives to Chinese suppliers. But China’s midstream refining capacity remains the true bottleneck, one that is vastly harder to replicate. Arguably, the U.S.’ quest for rare earths and minerals has also animated much of Trump’s diplomatic outreach during his second term: from designs on mines in Greenland, to “mineral deals” imposed on Ukraine, efforts to end the D.R. Congo-Rwanda war, a sudden reversal on the AUKUS submarine deal with Australia, and efforts to reinvigorate the U.S.’ stalled engagement with Central Asia.

The Kremlin’s “roadmap” is timed to exploit this American scramble. As Putin’s envoys explore a potential Ukraine “peace deal” with Trump, on Russian terms if possible, Moscow now sees promises of a “rare earths partnership” as a handy negotiation tool. Leaked documents from before the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska even showed plans for “jointly mining rare earths in the Arctic.”

2. Why does the Russian government care?

Yet Putin’s interest goes beyond mere opportunism. The Russian government has supported the development of its rare earths industry with a dedicated state program since 2013. In 2016, Putin called rare earths “critical to Russia’s defence sector” — though 80% of domestic consumption serves the petrochemical industry, which itself contributes up to 45% of federal revenue.

Russia desperately needs rare earths for its most strategic sectors, but it currently mines and refines only around 2% of its own consumption. 98% of materials imported from foreign sources, overwhelmingly from China. This, in turn, sits uneasily with Putin’s desire for Russian “technological sovereignty” and “resource self-sufficiency”.

Here Russia’s ambivalence toward China is laid bare. Although Moscow’s relations with Beijing have arguably reached a pinnacle of stability and cooperativeness, Russia’s trust towards China remains conditional. In its discussion of the Russian rare earths “roadmap”, the paper Kommersant’ noted that “independence from imports from China” will be an explicit goal of the document. Mistrust toward Beijing is therefore an equally powerful driver as the leverage Moscow hopes to gain vis-à-vis Washington.

2. What do Russian deposits look like?

On paper, Russia is reasonably well-positioned to become an important player in global rare earths market: According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Russia sits on 3.8 million confirmed tons of rare earth elements, the fifth-largest deposit in the world behind China (44 million tons), Brazil (21 million tons), India (6.9 million tons) and Australia (5.7 million tons). Russian officials insist the real figure is far higher: According to the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, total reserves of “15 of the 17 rare earth metals in Russia amount to 28.5 million tons”. This would, according to a recent Izvestiya article by the head of Russia’s Security Council, Sergey Shoigu, be the second-largest reserves in the world — with their exploitation, tellingly, a future precondition for “Russia’s very existence as a sovereign state.”

Russia’s deposits are spread across a range of sites, most of which have been taken over by state corporations in the past two years. Only one is currently operational: The Lovozersky Mining and Processing Plant on the Kola peninsula, bought by state company Rosatom’s dedicated mining arm, Rosatom Nedra, in 2023. It supplies loparite concentrate to the Solikamsk Magnesium Plant near Perm, also taken over by Rosatom Nedra in 2024. Together they account for all Russian output of rare-earth compounds, niobium, and tantalum, as well as most domestic magnesium and a portion of titanium.

Also on the Kola Peninsula are the undeveloped Khibiny massif and the Afrikanda cluster, where JSC Arkmineral-Resource is exploring perovskite, titanium dioxide, rare-earth concentrates, and niobium and tantalum pentoxides.

The Tomtor field in Anabar ranks among the world’s most significant rare-earth deposits, notable both for concentration and sheer scale. Tomtor is the world’s largest undeveloped niobium project. One section alone contains an estimated 11.4 million tonnes of ore with roughly 700,000 tonnes of niobium oxide and 1.7 million tonnes of rare-earth oxides. The deposit was transferred to Rosneft in May 2025 after Putin complained that the previous, publicly traded owner had failed to invest on schedule.

Further to the south, Sergey Shoigu in October announced plans to establish an integrated rare earths supply-chain cluster around the Angara-Yenisei region, including multiple refinement plans to service Rosnedra’s Chuktukon rare earth-niobium deposit in the Krasnoyarsk krai.

Kolmozerskoye, Russia’s largest lithium deposit, is located in the Murmansk region. It reportedly contains 18.9% of Russia’s lithium reserves in 75 million tonnes of ore. In 2023, Polar Lithium LLC, a new joint venture of Rosatom and the nickel giant Nornickel, acquired the rights to exploit the field. The joint venture later partnered with a Chinese firm to jointly explore resources. Nornickel owner Vladimir Potanin announced in 2025 that the corporation would diversify towards rare earth mining, a remarkable step for a corporation that most closely resembles its gigantic, Soviet-era mono-industrial predecessor.

Finally, other northern Russian districts are also looking to be acknowledged as metals hubs: The Arkhangelsk oblast, for instance, highlights the future exploitability of the Pavlovskoye deposit on Novaya Zemlya, while the Bering strait region of Chukotka has been dangled to U.S. negotiators as a potential site for U.S.-Russian cooperation on rare earth mining.

4. What could possibly go wrong?

In spite of its rich endowments, Russia faces countless roadblocks on its way to becoming a truly independent rare earths producer. This is because its planned extraction of rare earth ores will only be the easy part: Like other countries (bar China), Russia is lacking the mid-stream separation and refining capacities to produce final products, such as magnets. Russia’s legacy refinement plants from the Soviet era are obsolete. They would need to be dismantled and completely rebuilt for refinement to proceed in Russia, but at globally competitive cost levels. This would, in turn, require massive amounts of capital investment, as well as state-of-the-art technologies, both of which are currently out of Russia’s reach due to international sanctions and lacklustre support from its international partners:

Firstly, while much noise has been made by Russian negotiators about the potential for American investments in Russian rare earth mining, the reality is that the Russian state companies involved in that project — including several Rosatom subsidiaries and Polar Lithium LLC — remain under crippling international sanctions. Even if those sanctions were to disappear overnight, however, international investor confidence in Russia — a country that is waging an illegal war of aggression, has incurred sanctions, and nationalised “dozens of foreign investors’ assets in the last three years with little or no compensation” — is likely to remain low. The billions needed to build modern refineries will not be raised domestically or internationally. Serious American or Chinese investment is, realistically, a pipe dream.

Secondly, in spite of its proclamations of “technological sovereignty”, Russia lacks the equipment required for large-scale rare earth refinement. Ironically, the Russian authorities have turned to Beijing — and even India — for help: In September, Prime Minister Denis Manturov admitted that Russia had been in talks with China to gain access to the necessary technologies, but that the Chinese side — much like the U.S. — had so far been unwilling to supply them.

Thirdly, many of Russia’s major deposits lie in extremely remote areas with almost no supporting infrastructure. The Tomtor field, for example, is only accessible by helicopter, and in the winter months. While appropriate logistics would be achievable on the Kola peninsula, many of Russia’s deposits in polar Siberia or the Far East remain effectively out of reach. This may explain, to a certain degree, why various Russian ministries have recently developed plans to link the Siberian river systems to ports along the Northern Sea Route. But the financing for these projects is all but guaranteed, and in particular the port town of Tiksi, near the Tomtor field, can look back at a lengthy history of development failures.

And finally, even in the hypothetical scenario that Russia scales production, its domestic demand would grow faster than output. Moscow’s rare earths dependency on China would stagnate rather than decline, a situation that mirrors the challenge faced by policymakers in Washington and Brussels.

5. Are Russia’s mining strategies at all realistic?

None of this has deterred, or is likely to deter, the Russian regime from pursuing expansive plans for metals and rare earths production. Extractivism remains a core organising principle of Russian politics, and natural-resource production will continue to underpin the country’s economic model for the foreseeable future. Combined with Vladimir Putin’s paranoid anti-globalism, entrenched sovereigntism, and the mounting financial demands of Russia’s comprehensive remilitarisation programme, state corporations will keep searching for ways to generate revenue through the development (osvoenie) of the country’s resource base. Environmental concerns — or the livelihoods of Indigenous communities in Anabar and beyond — will not restrain a state elite intent on extracting strategic advantage at all costs.

As global fossil-fuel consumption declines, Russia’s long-standing reliance on hydrocarbons will erode. Minerals, metals, and rare earth appear to offer a viable continuation of its extractivist model. This is why many of the country’s flagship strategic plans — including the “Geology: Revival of a Legend” programme announced in 2023 or the “Strategy for the Development of Russia’s Mineral Base until 2050” of 2024 — focus squarely on these materials.

Although deposits within Russia’s territory remain the primary focus, Moscow has increasingly trained its sights on resources beyond its borders. The 2024 “Strategy for the Development of Russia’s Mineral Base until 2050” explicitly identifies targets not only on Russian soil and the continental shelf, but also “[…] in Antarctica, the Arctic, the Svalbard archipelago, and the World Ocean.” In keeping with this quasi-imperial posture, Putin convened his Security Council on October 17 to discuss the “development of seabed mineral resources” — both within, and increasingly also beyond Russia’s national jurisdiction.

Any opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Arctic Today.

Lukas Wahden is a PhD candidate in International Relations at SciencesPo Paris and Associate Fellow with the Russia Program at George Washington University. He mostly writes about Russia, the poles, oceans and space.