Arctic transformations: Russia declares hard power

The paper considers the issue of the Arctic policy produced by the Russian Federation. Through the prism of the concepts of soft and hard power, proposed by the American political scientist J. Nye in the early 1990s, the author analyzes the course declared by the state to protect the Arctic interests. Now such interests have acquired great importance: the Arctic is a region that stores valuable resources - natural gas reserves, oil fields, etc. The possession of these resources is becoming a subject of international debate, especially since the boundaries of the Arctic lands are still mobile (which, for example, is happening with the Lomonosov Ridge, which is the subject of a longstanding dispute between Russia, Canada, and Denmark). Therefore, the need to achieve the set goals in the development of the Arctic, while maintaining a delicate balance in the field of international relations, is extremely important for the state. The question of methods and mechanisms of achieving goals becomes relevant in the context of modern instability: the crisis in relations between Russia and many European states, as well as the United States, which erupted in 2014, still affects political processes associated with the state’s activity in the foreign field. In this situation, the Russian Federation preferred to declare a hard power strategy in the Arctic Region, having officially formalized the transformation in international relations.