European Union

The Arctic is an exceptional venue for undisputed international cooperation against climate-induced threats. Due to this exceptionalism, it has long been an exceptional venue for undisputed international cooperation, i.e. ‘a zone of peace’. The contestations over the Arctic’s economic and security-related potential, however, seem to transform this region into a future Middle East.  While the region is under the dire pressure of climate-induced threats, the possibility of unlocking new opportunities for resource extraction and transport routes due to melting frost has fuelled the geopolitical race between major powers such as China and the EU.

Until the early 2010s, the EU and China disregarded each other in the Arctic due to the absence of a functional relationship. Due to its geographical position, the EU’s policy preferences have always been closely linked to the developments in its northern neighbourhood. Nevertheless, the Union’s regulatory influence, known as the Brussels effect, has been limited in Arctic affairs.  Moreover, the EU’s concerns over the involvement of a major power in the region were primarily about Russia. The 2007 headlines picturing the Russian flag on the Arctic seabed alarmed the Union against possible security implications of ‘the ongoing race for natural resources in the Arctic, which may lead to security threats for the EU and overall international instability’. Likewise, in those years, the Chinese interest in the region was primarily scientific. While China solidified its position as a key player in Arctic research through scientific expeditions in the late 1990s, Beijing maintained a low-key political approach, avoiding conflicts with the coastal states. By steering clear of sensitive topics like resource exploration, China was able to engage in constructive cooperation with these states.

Since the mid-2010s, however, the increasing presence of China in the Arctic has encouraged the EU to revise its Arctic policy. China’s shifting of its Arctic priorities towards the Barents, known to be the most prosperous sub-Arctic region in terms of resource endowment, has prompted the Union to add resource-related ambitions to the traditional pillars of its Arctic policy (fighting against climate change, scientific research and sustainability). In its 2012 joint communication on the Arctic region, the Commission stated that, as a priority within the scope of Raw Materials Strategy, the EU would ‘actively pursue a raw materials diplomacy with relevant Arctic states to secure access to raw materials notably through strategic partnerships and policy dialogues’.

China’s announcement of its Polar Silk Road plan in 2018 was another critical juncture. In its 2018 White Paper on Arctic strategy, China defined itself as a ‘Near-Arctic State’ as ‘one of the continental States closest to the Arctic Circle’. China also declared its objectives to include utilising Arctic resources (oil, gas, minerals, and other non-living resources) in a ‘lawful and rational manner’. Accordingly, Chinese policymakers focused on mineral resources while encouraging Chinese enterprises to explore and utilise Arctic resources. In this sense, their cooperation with Greenland for the mining operations in Kvanefjeld was a concrete example.

Beijing’s declaration of China as a ‘Near-Arctic State’ as well as its far-reaching projects and initiatives in the region, with the ambition of becoming a “polar power”, is seen as ‘cause of great concern’ by the EU. Particularly after the adoption of the European Green Deal and the subsequent strategies, such as the Clean Industrial Deal, China’s drive for Arctic resources has become a challenge for the EU’s green transition. The EU’s ambitious (internal) climate and energy policies are likely to have significant consequences with regard to its growing need for minerals essential for renewable energy technologies, batteries and the overall move towards more environmentally friendly operations. It is anticipated that there will be a substantial increase in the demand for numerous minerals extracted in the Arctic, and only Greenland possesses 25 per cent of the global reserves of rare earth minerals, which are essential to the transition of European industry.

Beijing’s drive for access to Arctic resources and strategic leverage in the region consequently has profound ramifications on the EU’s ability to deliver the European Green Deal. Particularly, the geopolitical competition over the extraction and flow of minerals becomes a matter of strategic autonomy for the EU. That is why, the Commission have occasionally raised concerns over the potential tensions that could ‘arise from competition in contested areas, such as space or the Arctic’. The concerns over China’s growing interest in the Arctic’s vast reserve of rare-earth minerals, ‘which would help the EU to reduce its dependency on China’, are shared by the other EU institutions. Indeed, strategic foresight studies reveal that the EU is overdependent on China for the supply for critical raw materials required particularly for the production and storage of solar and wind energy. Chinese firms’ dominance in the extraction and refining of these materials leaves minimal margin for supply diversification, making it more imperative for the EU to access Arctic resources.

All in all, the long-held perception of the Arctic as a peace zone is no longer valid. Rather, it has become an area for increasing rivalry, in which the EU’s economic security and strategic autonomy are at stake. In the context of the green (industrial) transition, the EU’s engagement in the Arctic matters has not only become ‘a geopolitical necessity’ to fulfil its ambitions, but also a matter of security. The tone of the EU’s current Arctic strategy reflects the EU’s security-related concerns over the ‘upturn in the activities of other actors, including China and growing interest in areas like ownership of critical infrastructure’. In this vein, the EU needs to revise its current Arctic policy based on pragmatic and strategic assessments. After all, navigating in a geopolitical race with a major power like China requires a more assertive and security-conscious approach to protect the Union’s vital interests in the High North.

 

The post The EU in the Arctic: How China’s Polar Ambitions Became a Challenge for the Green Transition appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Blog article adapted from ‘Shadows of a Nation: History, Identity, and the Transnistrian Question’ working paper presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference at the Panteion University, Athens on 30 May 2025. Will Kingston-Cox is a political researcher and postgraduate in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford, specialising in Moldova, nationalism, and post-Soviet separatism.

Pridnestrovie[1] rarely makes international headlines. When it does, the region is reductively portrayed as a frozen conflict zone in Moldova’s eastern periphery, a relict quirk of Soviet collapse, or a pawn in Russia’s geopolitical manoeuvring. Since its de facto separation from Moldova in 1990, it has operated with its own borders, government, army, and currency, but without international recognition. To reduce Pridnestrovie simply to a geopolitical anomaly obscures the ways in which history, memory, and identity converge to produce a distinctive political community on Europe’s edge.

The war in Ukraine has once again thrown Pridnestrovie into sharper focus. Around 1,500 Russian “peacekeepers” remain stationed there, and the unresolved status of the territory consistently overshadows Moldova’s aspirations for closer integration with the European Union. In January 2025, a regional gas crisis starkly revealed Pridnestrovie’s vulnerability. When Ukraine halted the transit of Russian gas, the region, long dependent on Moscow’s subsidies and infrastructure, entered a severe humanitarian crisis. Heating, schools, and factories shut down. Yet it was not Russia but Moldova, supported by the EU, that assisted in with emergency gas supplies. For the first time, Pridnestrovie’s economic survival depended on its western neighbour rather than its eastern patron.

To understand why this mattered so profoundly, it is necessary to look at how Pridnestrovie’s identity has developed vis-a-vis Russia and Moldova across five formative historical episodes.

The first is rooted in the imperial period. The lands east of the Dniester River (today’s Pridnestrovie) were annexed by the Russian Empire in 1792, two decades before Russia also absorbed Bessarabia, the territory that would later become modern Moldova. Whereas Bessarabian identity was shaped through alternating Romanian, Ottoman, and Russian influences, Pridnestrovie’s trajectory was unambiguously Russian imperial. It was settled largely by Russian and Ukrainian populations and became a multiethnic Slavic frontier embedded firmly in imperial administration. By the late nineteenth century, Pridnestrovie functioned as a Russian stronghold against a culturally and linguistically Romanian Bessarabia.

The second episode came in 1924 with the establishment of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) within the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Far from recognising Moldovan distinctiveness, this was a calculated act of Soviet identity engineering. The MASSR was designed to manufacture a “Moldovan” nationality that would both counteract Romanian nationalism across the river and provide a justification for future Soviet claims to Bessarabia. A Cyrillic-script “Moldovan” language was institutionalised, Soviet cultural production reinforced the distinction, and loyal political cadres were installed. What emerged was an artificial but enduring sense of divergence between the left and right banks of the Dniester.

The third moment of rupture was the Second World War. Between 1941 and 1944, Romanian and Nazi German occupation transformed Pridnestrovie into a killing ground for Jews and Roma. More than 120,000 were deported, interned, or killed in ghettos and forced labour camps. While Moldova west of the Dniester also experienced wartime violence, Pridnestrovie’s direct subjection to Romanian rule created a distinct political memory. Romania became remembered as an aggressor, a narrative later reinforced by Soviet historiography and subsequently instrumentalised by Pridnestrovian elites in the 1990s. The memory of wartime occupation continues to shape identity today. When Moldova renamed its state language from “Moldovan” to “Romanian” in 2023, this was read in Tiraspol as confirmation of Moldova’s equation with Romania, a symbolic threat to the idea of Pridnestrovian separateness.

The fourth episode unfolded during the Soviet period. Pridnestrovie became the industrial powerhouse of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), producing an estimated 80 per cent of its industrial output. It hosted the Soviet 14th Army and was integrated into the wider Odessa Military District as a hub for heavy industry and arms production. The region attracted large-scale migration from Russia and Ukraine, diluting the proportion of ethnic Moldovans and reinforcing a multi-ethnic demographic profile. Politically, Pridnestrovians dominated: by 1989, no Bessarabian Moldovan had ever served as First Secretary of the Moldovan Communist Party. For many inhabitants, their livelihoods and identity were tied to the Soviet system.

Ultimately, the final rupture came in 1990–1992. Moldova’s nationalist turn, especially the elevation of Romanian language and symbols, was perceived on the left bank not as liberation but as existential threat. Pridnestrovian separatists mobilised to preserve their Soviet-era privileges and resist “Moldovanisation,” which they equated with Romanian unification. The war claimed over 3,000 lives and ended with a ceasefire in July 1992 that left Moldova without control over Pridnestrovie. Since then, the self-proclaimed Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR) has existed as a de facto state. Its institutions are entrenched, but it remains internationally unrecognised.

The central question today is whether this de facto state has also generated a nation. Evidence suggests that it has, though in contested and pragmatic forms. Identity is cultivated through the memorialisation of the 1992 war, the memory of Romanian occupation, and loyalty to the PMR’s institutions. It is multiethnic by necessity: Russians, Ukrainians, and Moldovans coexist under the shared label of “Pridnestrovian.” As one young respondent explained: “I call myself Pridnestrovian because I was born here, but what does that actually mean?” Belonging is shaped less by ethnicity than by residence, political loyalty, and a sense of historical separation from Moldova.

This produces a paradoxical identity. On the surface it is inclusive, but it is also forged through trauma and external dependence. The PMR promotes itself as a multiethnic national polity, yet Russia sustains the system through subsidies, media influence, and symbolic gestures, whilst avoiding the step of formal recognition or annexation. As Moldova pursues its European trajectory and wrestles with its own divided polity over identity and geopolitical alignment, it is wholly conceivable that the ambiguity of Pridnestrovian identity and the longstanding unsettled political conflict will be reconciled. The unresolved conflict is not only a question of borders or recognition, but of competing identities and contested pasts: shadows that continue to shape Europe’s eastern edge.

[1] Pridnestrovie is the endonym for the region commonly known as Transnistria in English

The post Shadows of a Nation: Rethinking Identity in Pridnestrovie appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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