Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic

Two years later, the new Russian consul-general, Nikolai Konygin, invited Sunde and several other Norwegians to the consulate. He poured them shots of vodka and pinned a medal from the Russian Ministry of Defense to each of their jackets. Sunde was proud of his work on partisan history. But the ceremony made him uncomfortable, and he sipped only half of the shot. Soon afterward, he asked the P.S.T. for advice on how to avoid being exploited for propaganda purposes. “I did not want to be in their pocket,” he told me, of the Russians. “I did not want to be a useful idiot.”

A few days into the invasion of Ukraine, Sunde walked into the consulate and returned his Russian medal, in protest. The next time Konygin spoke at the Soviet war memorial, he told the assembled guests that, just as the Soviets had liberated them from the Nazis, so Russia was now striving to liberate Ukraine.

In October, 2023, Sunde co-wrote an editorial in a local paper, warning that the presence of any Russian official at the annual ceremony would be “an insult to Norway, to Ukraine, and to victims of war in all countries.”

Three days before the event, Sunde walked into a flower shop to order a yellow wreath on behalf of the municipality. The plan was to place it atop a makeshift pedestal—a step stool draped in a blue tablecloth—at the foot of the monument, to represent the Ukrainian flag.

“Have the Russians ordered anything?” he asked the shop owner.

But when Sunde returned to pick up the wreath, two days later, he ran into one of Konygin’s assistants at the shop. The man had come to collect a wreath of identical size, in Russian colors. “You know, you’re not welcome tomorrow, at the monument,” Sunde said to him. The man just smiled and walked away.

Early the next morning, Sunde arrived at the monument to set up the pedestal. The mayor, Magnus Mæland, appeared, and Sunde handed him the wreath. “I don’t believe in low tension anymore,” Mæland, who had been elected just a few weeks earlier, told me. “I believe that we have to be strong, because the only language that the Putin regime understands is strength. If you’re not telling your whole opinion to the Russians, they will take your silence as approval.”

The ceremony was held at 8:30 a.m., to insure that the Russians didn’t beat them to it. There were a half-dozen journalists present, but no townspeople. Mæland addressed the crowd: “In 1944, Ukrainian soldiers were among those in the Soviet Red Army who contributed to our liberation.” He went on, “Today, we support Ukraine in its pursuit of liberation.”

Mæland and Sunde left. Then, just before 11 A.M., a small group of townspeople started to assemble—Russian citizens and their supporters living in Kirkenes. A pair of cars with blue diplomatic plates pulled up to the monument. Konygin climbed out and delivered a speech, wearing a St. George ribbon. The air was frigid—his breath turned to mist as he spoke. Sunde learned of the Russians’ arrival, and hurried over. He stood alone with his arms crossed, his back turned to Konygin in protest. Some of the Russian townspeople snickered.

Konygin finished his remarks, and placed the Russian wreath below Sunde’s makeshift pedestal. Then he retrieved another display—an enormous array with plastic flowers—and placed it over the municipality’s wreath, smothering it.

Sunde turned his head, then whirled around, enraged. “Nikolai, you can’t do that!” he said. He walked over to Konygin, but Konygin acted as if Sunde didn’t exist. He and his retinue walked back to their vehicles and drove off.

To several of the Norwegian journalists at the scene, Konygin’s actions felt like an act of domination, an assertion of Russian power—and perhaps even sovereignty—over a patch of Norwegian land. Sunde called Mæland, who returned and placed Konygin’s plastic flower display to the side of the monument. Mæland began to speak to the journalists and Russians who were still present. “You must respect the South Varanger municipality,” he said.

As he spoke, a Russian woman who lives in Kirkenes slipped behind him. She picked up Konygin’s display and placed it back on top of the municipality’s wreath.

That night, Konygin’s display went missing. It was late October, and the river was still flowing. Then came the mørketid, and when it lifted—when the first dawn came, two months later, and the sun breached the horizon at last—those plastic flowers were entombed in the ice.

After the ceremony, Russian officials summoned Norway’s Ambassador in Moscow and lodged a complaint against Mæland, calling his response to Konygin “an act of vandalism” and a “violation of the memory of the soldiers-liberators.” Soon afterward, an anonymous Facebook account circulated a Photoshopped image of Mæland standing at the memorial as a suicide drone flew at his head. Then Sunde led a successful effort for South Varanger to cancel its friendship agreement with the district of Pechenga. (The agreement with Severomorsk, the headquarters of the Northern Fleet, had been scrapped a year into the war.) “Think of this area as a pot of water on a low boil,” Roaldsnes told me, over a Christmas lunch of salted sheep. “Once in a while, it boils over.”

The Russian Embassy in Oslo declined to answer detailed questions, claiming that this article is “unworthy of substantive comment, since it is a malicious fiction.” But, while I was living in Kirkenes, last November, days before the sun set for the last time of the year, more Russian hybrid operations that had been tested in Kirkenes started being replicated, at scale, all over Europe. The F.S.B. rounded up migrants from Africa and the Middle East and pushed them across the border into northern Finland, in subzero temperatures. Then a Russian electronic-warfare unit started jamming G.P.S. signals in the Baltic Sea. Tens of thousands of civilian flights have been affected—alarms blaring in the cockpit, passengers blissfully unaware. The Kremlin also issued criminal charges against the Prime Minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas, for her decision to remove Soviet war memorials. “Crimes against the memory of those who liberated the world from Nazism and Fascism must be punished,” a spokesperson for the foreign minister said. “This is just the beginning.”

When the Kremlin first announced mobilizations, to restock the front line in Ukraine, hundreds of wealthy Russians fled to Kirkenes. Suddenly, the hotels were filled with “young Russian men wearing expensive sweatpants,” as Roaldsnes put it. Most of them continued on; Kirkenes was just a choke point on the way out. Many will likely never return—a man from Murmansk parked his Lamborghini at the Kirkenes airport, removed the license plate, and vanished.

Among those who stayed was Georgii Chentemirov, the former head of the journalists’ union in Karelia, just south of the Kola Peninsula. Chentemirov left Russia six months into the war and joined the staff of the Barents Observer. A few months later, the Kremlin declared him a foreign agent, and government officials in Karelia began reposting anonymous blog posts saying that he was a traitor.

In Kirkenes, Chentemirov’s new neighbors are Russians who support the war. “They believe Russian propaganda,” he told me. “I don’t understand it, because Russian propaganda says that we need to destroy Europe. And they live in Europe!”

Chentemirov joined a local boxing class, in a bomb shelter that had been converted into a gym. I joined as well, for several weeks of the mørketid, and was often paired with a fighter from Kherson, near Crimea, who had a thick scar that ran below his left cheekbone, from his nose almost to his ear. I never learned which side of the war he was on—Kherson has been won and lost by each side. Chentemirov, who is six feet three, usually trained against the only other person in the group who was as tall as him: a man in his mid-thirties named Igor, who worked as a driver and courier for Konygin.

There were only two heavy punching bags, so some pairs had to practice on pads that had been duct-taped around concrete support pillars. The coach shouted instructions in Russian. The lights flickered. After class, my sweat always turned into ice. “Some people cannot stand the dark time,” a local had told me. “But you have to be able to cope with it, or else you cannot live here.” Chentemirov and Igor stood on opposite sides of a pillar, punching the concrete between them. ♦

A previous version of this piece misspelled Kari Aga Myklebost’s last name.