Russia is viewed as a threat which, by the alliance's logic, must be pushed out of the region.
Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergey Ryabkov, has accused NATO of turning the Arctic into an arena for military build-up, according to a report by the state news agency TASS. In a video address to a roundtable on Europe's militarisation held at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Vienna, Ryabkov said Moscow's opponents were expanding their capabilities in the northern latitudes.
According to the report, Ryabkov said NATO's planning attaches particular importance to the Arctic, and that Russia is viewed as a threat which, by the alliance's logic, must be pushed out of the region. He pointed to what he described as expanding military activity by NATO and some of its members, acting individually and in groups, including missions he named as Arctic Sentry and large-scale exercises designated Neptune Strike 26.
Ryabkov characterised those exercises as designed to rehearse countering Russia and, in his words, in reality striking Russian territory. The TASS account gives no further detail on the scale, timing or location of the activities he cited, and no response from NATO or its member states is included in the report.
The remarks matter because the Arctic has become one of the few theatres where Russian and NATO military planning touch directly, across a long shared frontier and increasingly contested sea routes. A public accusation delivered at an OSCE forum is itself a signal: Moscow is using the organisation's platform to frame allied activity in the high north as destabilising, and to argue that its own posture there is defensive. The venue is notable, since the OSCE has been largely sidelined as a security forum since the war in Ukraine, and Russian officials have continued to use its meetings to broadcast grievances to Western delegations.
What is not yet known is whether Ryabkov's claims reflect a documented change in allied deployments or a rhetorical escalation ahead of other diplomatic business. The report does not say when Arctic Sentry activities took place, what Neptune Strike 26 involves beyond the Russian characterisation, or whether any NATO member has confirmed or disputed the account. Nor does it indicate what, if anything, Moscow intends to do in response beyond public protest.
For now the episode is best read as a statement of Russian positioning rather than a description of a new confrontation. It nonetheless underlines that the Arctic, long treated as a low-tension periphery, is being drawn into the wider contest between Russia and the alliance, and that both sides now describe the other's routine activity there in the language of threat.
