Is Global Icebreaker Race Imminent?

... half live in Russia. The largest Arctic cities also happen to be Russian—Murmansk, Norilsk, Vorkuta, to mention a few. The country desperately needs to keep all-season communication lines in operation, and a diverse and fully operational fleet of icebreakers is a natural way to keep these lines open; all available alternatives offered by ground or air transportation would be much more expensive. As for Beijing, it released its Arctic Policy paper in 2018, in which China was positioned as a "Near-Arctic State." It is a major stakeholder in the North, but its interests are confined mostly to potential energy and other resource exploration as well as transportation and wild-life preservation. For the US,...