Murmansk

The bottom line is if you look at the data on, on a, on a graph, I know this is a podcast, just think about a hockey stick, right? And it's basically a hockey stick.

So it started out with a gradual increase, and then in 2026, while it had increased substantially from where it started, it has now gone up into the curve of a hockey stick, and we're, we're at, you know, over 500 drones a day being launched into various parts of Russia, Russia, stretching from, for those that are geography experts, St. Petersburg in the west, Murmansk in the northwest on the Arctic Circle, all the way to areas like Yekaterinburg in Siberia, right? 2,500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, and then down to the Caucus regions, Sochi and the Black Sea, uh, enclaves that, that Russia, uh, has oil, gas, and, and other maritime and Navy assets.

So this is a wide swath of territory where these drones are being launched.

They're doing this to spread out Russian air defense capacity so it can't be massed in any one spot.

Moscow confirmed the arrival.

Maria Zakharova, Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman, confirmed the safe return of the citizens, stating they received assistance from Russian regional authorities before their onward travel to the Russian city of Murmansk.

The ship, though, is going nowhere.

The Professor Molchanov remains in Norwegian custody in Svalbard pending litigation.

Papers from Moscow arrived ordering the final disposition of all survivors—reassignment, forced retirement, or immediate redeployment.

Irina was sent to a laboratory outside Murmansk, her work on linguistic patterning consigned to obscurity.

Anna was granted leave, on medical grounds, never to practice again in any port with classified clearance.

Marina vanished from her bunk, a note left that said only, “You can tell our story if you find the words.” I carried Anna’s spiral chart and Rasvetnik codes out with me, stuffed deep in my coat.

And the Soviet Union received nearly 3,000 hurricanes through the Arctic convoys.

Those brutal supply runs past Norway to Murmansk and Archangel.

Soviet opinion was mixed.

Some pilots found it slower than their Yak fighters and less suited to the Eastern Front's combat profile.

We sometimes forget just how strategically critical Norway is, don't we?

Yeah, and it's partly because, as we've just heard, a large part of the Russian nuclear enterprise, nuclear weaponry systems, and the Barents fleet, I think they call it, or the North Sea fleet, the fleet that's based around there, and Archangel, which is just beyond from Murmansk.

So if you're trying to create a strategic concern for NATO, one of the ways you can do it, if you're Russian... is come around through the Arctic and put nuclear submarines into the North Atlantic.

And between Norway, Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom, there's this whole area that you need to monitor if you're NATO with submarines, sonar sensors, various other methods.

I returned to Paris a month later, unable to sleep through the night except when I set the white noise generator by my bed.

Victor sent a single message, a photo of girls circling an oil rig off Murmansk, no caption.

Caroline submitted her resignation without a call, Miguel found work at a clinical lab in Madrid, his face a fraction more haunted each time he flickered across my screen.

Sonia never contacted me again, though I heard, indirectly, that she'd applied for a post somewhere far inland, as far from salt as one could get in Europe.

First, they're getting data from new sources, basically everybody, from oil and gas companies to environmental groups to militaries, with some caveats.

The Russians are never gonna give us their high resolution map of the approaches to Murmansk [laughs] Harbor, and the Chinese aren't going to do the same with their approaches to Qingdao, and we wouldn't expect them to.

But what we would expect them to do, if they're able to say, "We're willing to let you have a map which is accurate to maybe 100 meters," that's great.

It's still giving us a, a much more detailed map than presently exists.

Whereas Russia and China, they just recently piloted the Polar Silk Express, the Polar Silk Road, because now it's the summer season, the polar ice melted.

Now you can travel from Shanghai to Murmansk in the Arctic region of Russia.

that takes less time than travel through the, the, the Red Sea and the Swiss Canal.

And that, that route mostly goes through coastal water of Russia, you know, a friendly territory for, for Chinese fleet.