Denmark rejected Russia's offer to divide the Arctic in two
Last week Russian Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Sergey Donskoy said to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he wanted to start a bilateral dialogue with Denmark as soon as possible, to decide how to allocate control of the Arctic, including the North Pole.
But, as reported by the Financial Times, Copenhagen rejected Moscow’s proposal to split the 550,000 sq km-territory between them. Minister of Foreign Affairs of Denmark Kristian Jensen told the newspaper that his country wants to remain within the framework of the process, led by the United Nations, despite the fact that the organization’s experts predict that this territorial dispute will not be resolved in under a few decades.
“We must adhere to the international rules. This is the right way to move forward,” Jensen said.
The newspaper wrote that Moscow and Copenhagen both claim the North Pole and the Lomonosov Ridge, which stretches over 1,800 km from the coast of Greenland and Canada to the waters of eastern Siberia. The Danish party believes that Ottawa will also express their territorial jurisdiction in 2018.
"It is probably too early to say that we can negotiate the terms of this territory in a bilateral fashion. We do not know what Canada will decide. They can say, ‘Hey, you are dividing our part of the world,’” the Danish minister said.