Zadewasser runs the Restaurant Kroa in Longyearbyen, a town where the war is dividing communities after long years of neighbourly coexistence between Russians and Norwegians. Photos: dpa
A blue and yellow flag obscures a large bust of Vladimir Lenin that was gifted to the islanders in happier times: Even in the Arctic wilds, support for Ukraine in its fight against Kremlin oppression is tangible.
After decades of peaceful coexistence in the coal-mining centre of Spitsbergen – today also called Svalbard – Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year has driven a wedge between the archipelago's Norwegian and Russian inhabitants.
"With this flag, we are showing that we are completely against this war," says Zandra Zadewasser, manager of the Kroa restaurant in the town of Longyearbyen, which borrowed the flag from a local Ukrainian family and hung it over the Bolshevik leader's effigy.
For decades, the communities lived and worked together as one in this demilitarised corner of Norway's far north. Now the townsfolk face a difficult balancing act: Preserving the life they shared for so long, while opposing a war that excludes this on moral grounds.
Longyearbyen is often called the northernmost settlement on Earth, and with its 2,400 inhabitants it is Spitsbergen's main population centre. The second-largest settlement is an hour's snowmobile drive west: Barentsburg has around 350 inhabitants, lives off mining and is owned by the Russian state-owned Trust Arcticugol coal company.
Ads at Longyearbyen airport highlight Barentsburg in Russia. Russians and Norwegians have worked together for years but the war in Ukraine is upsetting their neighbourly alliances and relationships.
The Lenin in the Kroa also came from Barentsburg, says Zadewasser. When wood for the restaurant's opening was brought here 25 years ago, the bust was included in the delivery as a Russian gift.
Mainland Norway and Russia share an almost 200km border in the far north, but nowhere are they as close as on Spitsbergen. This is the result of the 1920 Spitsbergen Treaty, which granted Norway sovereignty over the archipelago.
The Russian empire acquired mining rights here more than a century ago, which gave rise to neighbourly ties that survived the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union – until the attack on Ukraine.
"Before 2022, we had a good relationship with the tourism company in Barentsburg," says Ronny Brunvoll, head of the neighbouring Visit Svalbard tour company. "But when the war began on Feb 24 last year, everything changed."
Some traditions like sporting competitions and an Orthodox Christmas church celebration for children continued after the invasion. Other areas were overturned, however, and customs controls – previously unthinkable – were introduced to prevent circumvention of the sanctions imposed on Russia for the war.
The war in Ukraine can be felt in the Earth's northernmost settlement. A Ukrainian flag hanging up in the Kroa restaurant in Longyearbyen, in front of a bust of Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a present from a Russian company that recalls easier times.
Especially in tourism, which along with mining is the main economic driver here, the mood today is like the weather: At sub-zero.
Spitsbergen's tourism industry has now cut all contact with Barentsburg, where the Grumant tour operator is a subsidiary of Arcticugol. The once popular snowmobile excursions to the Russian coal settlement and other offers connected to Russian state-owned companies are no longer advertised or mentioned by Visit Svalbard.
Tourism is not prohibited in Barentsburg or the Soviet ghost town of Pyramiden, says Brunvoll. "But most companies avoid going there. They think it's wrong."
The intention is not to hit the local Russians, he says, but someone else in Moscow, almost 2,600km away. This is Russian President Vladimir Putin's war – and he indirectly has control over the company operating in Barentsburg and its revenues.
"The right thing to do, in my view, is not to support warfare by supporting Russian activities here," adds Brunvoll.
Russians against the war
In Barentsburg, people would like to see politics and business separated.
"Should we be punished just because we are Russian?" Grumant boss Tatyana Ageyeva asked in an open letter last autumn before the decision to exclude the company from local tourism.
Most Barentsburg residents are from Ukraine's eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions and left precisely because of the conflict, wrote Ageyeva, adding, "We are for cohesion, development and cooperation."
Everyone in Longyearbyen agrees about the injustice of the war, says a Ukrainian shop assistant in town, while another resident adds, "If you are a Russian in the village, you live here because you are against the war." Many people support imprisoned Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny, says the woman.
The Ukraine war may seem far away on Spitsbergen, but it feels very close, as many people on Longyearbyen's snowy main street agree.
Meanwhile, Norway's PST intelligence service is keeping a close eye on the archipelago: "Any change or uncertainty about Norway's policy in the far north will be of interest to Russian intelligence services," the PST wrote in February in its national risk assessment for 2023.
Like many in Longyearbyen, Brunvoll hopes relations will one day return to normal. But first, he says, there needs to be a solution in Ukraine – and then it will probably take many years before there can be a trusting relationship with Russia again.
"I hope that at some point there will be the old Svalbard as before the war. But when and how? I can't say," he says.
So for the time being, the Ukrainian flag in the Kroa restaurant will remain where it is – hanging right under Lenin's nose. – dpa
