Russian doctrine of international law on the Arctic: a 100-year ice of solitude

The relevance of the revision of scholarly approaches to the legal regime of the Arctic is conditioned by the emergence of new factors. These include the development of judicial and other practices in the field of maritime law, global warming, the development of the institution of state responsibility for anthropogenic pollution of the sea, the growing importance of the Northern Sea Route, the intensification of superpower rivalry, including in the Arctic region, and the conflict in Ukraine. The descriptive part of the article is presented in seven sections, each of which deals with a separate fragment of the Russian scholarly discourse (concept of regional customs, sectoral principle, interpretation of Article 234 of the Convention on the Law of the Sea, regime of navigation in the waters of the Northern Sea Route, etc.). A brief review of the main facts and documents is followed by a summary of the theses of Russian authors, which in turn are followed by counter-arguments borrowed from the works of foreign scholars or formulated by the author himself. The eighth section discusses the methodological peculiarities of the Russian doctrine that negatively affect the quality of its arguments; the ninth one outlines the author’s vision of the genesis of the Arctic legal regime and formulates promising strategies for defending Russian interests in the region. The article reaches two main conclusions. The first conclusion is the inadequacy of Russian approaches in the field of the law of the sea to Russia’s geopolitical interests and the general theory of international law. The second conclusion is the existence of alternative strategies for the defense of Russian interests — more modern, well-founded and effective. The use of these strategies requires the revision of existing approaches, collective work, support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation and extensive communication with foreign colleagues. This is an extremely important and urgent task.