By Murad Rakhimov | 2026-03-20

Moscow positions the Arctic as a cornerstone of Russian power. It is home to nuclear installations, the Northern Sea Route, and vast reserves of oil, gas and minerals. But the people who live there are voting with their feet.

The population of Murmansk Region has shrunk by 45% over the past 25 years, to 651,000, according to Ivan Tananaev, director of the Institute of Chemistry and Technology of Rare Elements and Mineral Raw Materials. Across eight Arctic territories, the permanent population fell from 9.4 million in 1989 to under 5 million by 2014, and the decline has not stopped.

Reversing the trend requires major investment in housing, medicine, energy and food supply, Komsomol'skaya Pravda cited Tananaev as saying in February.

A colonial paradigm

The arc of decline is long. In the 20th century, the state used both incentives and force, including the mass deportations of the 1930s–50s, to populate the north. By the 1990s, that model had collapsed. Workers now go north on a rotating basis and return home.

"Since the 17th century, since the time when 'gold-boiling' Mangazeya existed, we've seen this situation in Russia where a city was built in the place where some resource was found or concentrated, and then the city disappeared as soon as the resource was exhausted," Russian blogger and rights activist Alexander Kim told Kontur, referring to the first Russian Arctic city in Siberia.

The pattern repeated in Turukhansk, Vorkuta and many other cities. The Soviet Union attempted to break it but never fully succeeded, and those efforts collapsed along with the USSR, long before the war in Ukraine began.

Kim said living conditions in the north are fundamentally incompatible with permanent settlement for people from the temperate zone unless the state compensates them adequately, and it has not.

"The Russian north historically depends greatly on provisioning. In many respects this is because of the colonial paradigm of governing it," Kim said.

The Kremlin's spending priorities make that hierarchy visible, he noted. Infrastructure investment flows toward occupied Ukrainian territories. The northern periphery remains what it has always been -- a donor from which resources are extracted.

In his view, if the war ends without a regime change in Russia, that expansion will continue at the north's expense.

War drains the North

The war has compounded a pre-existing fiscal crisis.

Most Russian regions entered 2025 with a record combined budget deficit of nearly 1.5 trillion RUB (around $19 billion) -- triple the prior year's figure. Among the hardest hit are Arctic regions: the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District carries an 84 billion RUB deficit and Khanty-Mansi 72 billion RUB.

Political analyst Anvar Nazirov said the north and the Far East have long been financed with whatever funds remain and that corruption has made chronic underfunding worse.

"Putin's strategy is to capture foreign land at the expense of developing his own territory. The condition of the Russian north today is a glaring example of that," Nazirov told Kontur.

Meanwhile, the Northern Sea Route, a 5,600-kilometer (3,480-mile) corridor from Murmansk to the Bering Strait, also a key artery for Russia's sanctions-evading shadow fleet, remains well short of its targets. Putin signed a 2018 decree requiring 80 million tons of cargo transit by 2024 and 200 million tons by 2030. Last year only 37 million tons passed through, down 2.3% from the year before.

'A dying breed'

Russia's broader demographic crisis deepens the picture.

Alisher Ilkhamov, director of London-based Central Asia Due Diligence, said the natural population decline exceeded half a million in 2024 -- up 20% from the previous year -- and that military spending is now crowding out the civilian investment the north needs.

"Now the authorities are resorting to the rotation system to prop up the economy of underpopulated regions. But at some point, given the underlying trends this method will stop working too," Ilkhamov told Kontur.

If it fails, he added, the only force that might sustain interest in the territory is foreign -- countries like China or the United States drawn by its natural resources.

"This is one of the signs of the 'dying breed' called Russia. It's one of the signs of its end," Nazirov said.