Inside an Arctic Town on the Frontline of Russian Hybrid War

Kirkenes, situated miles from the Russian border, is a microcosm of Russia’s constant hybrid warfare on Western soil. 

KIRKENES, NORWAY — “Don’t be afraid, be aware,” Thomas Nilsen, a Norwegian journalist and chief editor of the Barents Observer, told me over coffee in his newsroom in May.

We were in Kirkenes, a Norwegian Arctic town just a few miles away from the border with Russia. Decades of cross-border espionage has earned Kirkenes a reputation as a place where “anyone might be a spy”; even the hotel where I stayed is shrouded in legends. Coming from Kyiv on an obvious Kremlin-upsetting mission of researching Russian hybrid warfare in the Arctic, I was admittedly anxious.

Russia has been waging a hybrid war against the West for decades—launching cyberattacks, interfering in elections, spying on critical infrastructure, and assassinating people in European capitals in broad daylight. And despite the popular Norwegian idea of “High North, Low Tension,” the Arctic has hardly been immune to Russian hybrid warfare activity. In many ways, Kirkenes serves as a laboratory for Moscow’s hybrid operations all across Europe. Civilian aircraft flying into Kirkenes no longer use GPS because of constant Russian jamming. Russian fishing vessels, which the Kremlin uses for intelligence gathering and sabotage, regularly dock in the Kirkenes port. Over the years, many locals have been approached by both Russian and Norwegian intelligence agencies. One Norwegian border guard, Frode Berg, even wound up in prison in Moscow on real espionage charges after delivering secret packages to Russia for the Norwegian spy service. In conversations with me, he described himself both as, formerly, “a friend of Russia” and, in the words of his handler, “a very good Norwegian.” After two years in a Russian jail, Berg was freed in a prisoner swap in 2019.

A microcosm of Russia’s constant hybrid warfare on Western soil, Kirkenes—which sits on Norway’s northern coast, well north of the Arctic Circle, where the country crashes into both Finland and Russia—is now home to roughly 4,000 people, including hundreds of Russian citizens. It is exactly what you would expect: quiet, secluded, cold, with only one decent restaurant and “terrible nightlife,” as Nilsen put it. The liveliest parts of Kirkenes are a small shopping mall, whose very existence surprised me, a local school, and the lobby of my hotel, buzzing with tourists who come for nature and something called “king crab safari”— a boat ride to retrieve enormous crabs from their seabed traps before cooking them. To the extent that there is a town center, which is just three blocks of a street, it’s occupied by shops, pubs, and an art gallery.

And then there is the Russian General Consulate, whose employees have been linked to the FSB, and whose CCTV cameras conveniently point right at the entrance of the Kirkenes town hall nearby.

For decades, Kirkenes was a hub for cross-border cooperation between Norway and Russia. The town hosted all sorts of events, facilitating tourism, business, and cultural exchange between the two countries. Thousands of people crossed the border every day, shopping, working, and socializing.

This people-to-people diplomacy wasn’t unique to Kirkenes. After Norway became a founding member of NATO in 1949, Oslo had to figure out how to coexist with its militarily far superior neighbor, the Soviet Union, while relying on the distant United States for security. To mitigate this dilemma, Norway pursued the strategy of “deterrence and reassurance.” NATO’s Article 5 was the deterrent, while reassurance came through Norway’s self-imposed bans on stationing foreign bases, troops, and nuclear weapons on its territory. Oslo also pursued friendly relations with Moscow, hoping that soft power and diplomacy would prevent the Russians from seeing Norway as a potential threat.

Apart from a few spy scandals and fishing drama, it was all largely kumbaya until 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Norway, though not part of the European Union, nevertheless followed the EU’s lead on sanctions, condemning the invasion and halting most military and political contact between the two countries.

Yet for many in Norway’s High North, a tougher stance on Russia was a hard sell. “People up here didn’t take the 2014 invasion seriously,” Nilsen told me. As late as 2019—by which time Russia had invaded and annexed parts of Ukraine, launched several international cyberattacks, and meddled in European and American elections—the mayor of Finnmark county, which includes Kirkenes, advocated for the lifting of sanctions against the Kremlin.

“We have a different relationship with Russia than elsewhere …. Up here, the Russians are seen as our friends and neighbors,” former county mayor Ragnhild Vassvik Kalstad said in an op-ed, arguing that sanctions hurt local Norwegian businesses. Russia was “such a good neighbor” to Norway, Kalstad argued, in part because it liberated Kirkenes from the Nazis in 1944. (The mayor probably didn’t know that one of the first Red Army soldiers to cross into Kirkenes was Fedir Kompaniyets, a Ukrainian from Sumy, one of 7 million Ukrainians who fought against the Nazis with the Soviet Union.)

Even the full-scale invasion didn’t seem to change the minds of some Kirkenes residents about Russia. On Feb. 24, 2022, as Russian forces were attacking Ukraine from all directions, then-mayor of Kirkenes Lena Norum Bergeng told the Barents Observer she believed “dialogue and people-to-people cooperation will now be even more important than before.”

“I do not condemn the Russian people, who are our citizens, colleagues, neighbors, friends and family,” the former mayor said.

As Nilsen and I drove to the border crossing, I switched off my phone so that it wouldn’t catch Russia’s network. Road signs in Cyrillic pointed toward Murmansk, a Russian port city only three hours away from Kirkenes. It is the only port in Russia that stays ice-free all year round without icebreakers, providing Russian vessels, including nuclear submarines, with an unrestricted path to the Atlantic Ocean. Murmansk was built at the outset of World War I specifically to help ship Allied supplies to Russia. Two decades later, it became a crucial hub for the Arctic convoys that delivered millions of tons of lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union during World War II.

These days, the border checkpoint is the quietest it’s been since the days of the Soviet Union. Fewer than 100 crossings take place every day. After the full-scale invasion, Norway prohibited private cars with Russian plates from entering the country and banned nearly all entry to Russian citizens. Dual citizens and visa holders traveling for essential purposes can still come through, some using the daily minibus that runs between Kirkenes and Murmansk. Decreased traffic isn’t the only sign of increased tensions; another is active fence construction by the Norwegians.

Getting to Kirkenes is so excruciatingly long—three trains, three planes, and nearly 36 hours without quality sleep—that it can feel like traveling to the end of the Earth. And yet, Russia’s war felt, and, in fact, was, extremely close. 

Just 10 miles east of the Norwegian border are Russian military settlements called Pechenga and Sputnik, which are home to the 200th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade and the 61st Naval Infantry Brigade. Both units were once seen as some of Moscow’s most elite and highly trained Arctic forces. The brigades have a long and bloody history in Ukraine. Their presence dates back to 2014, when the Russian military invaded Donbas for the first time. Since 2022, marines from the 61st Brigade have been stationed on the left bank of Dnipro River across from my hometown, Kherson. That area is now infamous for what Ukrainians call “Russian human safari”—drone operators hunting down and killing civilians, including, recently, a one-year-old boy. The United Nations said in a 2025 report that Russia’s “pattern of drone attacks targeting civilians” in the Kherson area amounted to crimes against humanity.

A bit further east from those military settlements sits the Kola Peninsula, one of the most heavily militarized areas in the world. A patch of land as big as Estonia and Latvia combined, Kola hosts around a dozen naval and submarine bases and shipyards. The most important is the headquarters of Russia’s Northern Fleet, which operates nuclear submarines—the crux of Russia’s nuclear second strike capability and one of Russia’s most crucial strategic military assets. There are also several airfields, among them Olenya, where Russia keeps a dozen of its strategic nuclear-capable bombers that have been bombarding Ukraine regularly since 2022. Ukraine has attacked Olenya with drones many times, most notably during the recent Operation Spider Web, destroying several aircraft.

A lesser-known resident of Kola is GUGI, which is a Russian acronym that stands for the Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research. This highly secretive body within Russia’s Ministry of Defense is responsible for mapping NATO’s subsea infrastructure and other maritime espionage, operating surface ships, naval drones, and some of Russia’s most secret submarines. One of those subs is the nuclear-powered Losharik, which can operate deeper than almost any other vessel, at 20,000 feet below the sea.

In 2019, the Losharik caught fire and dramatically surfaced a few dozen miles off the coast of Norway, close to Kirkenes. All 14 high-ranking crew members died. Norwegian authorities never said a word about what the Losharik was up to that close to NATO territory. Guessing from the few images revealed after the incident, Nilsen thinks the Russians could be trying to install a mini nuclear reactor on the sea floor, one that could power some sort of secret military infrastructure.

Nukes and spy submarines at Norway’s doorstep are only part of the problem. What’s trickier to deal with is Russia’s exploitation of commonplace civilian activity, like fishing and even praying.

Norway is the only country in Europe that still allows Russian fishing vessels to dock in three of its ports, including Kirkenes. Local politicians argue the measure is necessary to maintain fishing quotas and protect the environment in the Barents Sea, where Russia and Norway have long fished together. Maritime and seafood industries make up the bulk of Norway’s exports and contribute significantly to the economy, so their regulation is a sensitive subject for many Norwegians.

But the risks may outweigh the benefits. In May, the EU sanctioned Russia’s biggest fishing company, the Murmansk-based Norebo, as well as another company, Murman Seafood, for participating in “Russian state-sponsored surveillance campaign that employs inter alia, civilian fishing trawlers, to conduct espionage missions directed against civilian and military infrastructure in the North and Baltic Sea.” The EU also said those activities “can facilitate future sabotage operations” and cited Russia’s most recent maritime doctrine, which specifically allows the Russian military to use civilian vessels for its operations.

The evidence of this happening isn’t hard to find. One of Murman Seafood’s vessels, Melkart-5, appears to have been involved in damaging one of the two fiber optic cables that connect the Norwegian mainland to Svalbard, a remote Norwegian archipelago even farther north than Kirkenes. That same vessel also violated shore leave regulations in Kirkenes when its seamen, who are supposed to stay within a confined regulated area, wandered off toward a strategically important bridge in the area.