On RIA Novosti’s talk show “Russian Angle,” host Andrei Zolotov recently interviewed Viktor Boyarski, Chairman of the Russian Geographic Society’s Polar Committee. The two discussed the International Arctic Forum on the Arctic, which took place in Moscow from September 22-23. The five-minute video can be seen online here. While Russian news in English is ostensibly produced for a non-Russian audience, at the very least, such media still offers some insight into how Russians would like their Arctic policy to be received by the global community.
Boyarski thinks that competition in the Arctic will help to “develop new technologies, and he doesn’t believe that fighting will occur. He cited the example of the Russia-Norway agreement over the delineation of the Barents Sea maritime border, which was recently made official. Zolotov asked Boyarski why the forty-year dispute suddenly came to an end. He responded,
“Time changes because the people in charge fortunately understood that the only way to solve problems is to make dialogue.”
He added,
“The title of the conference is exactly what reflects what is going on [in the Arctic], and hopefully what will be going on there.”
