Militarisation as Crisis Multiplier: Reassessing EU-Russia Arctic Relations Post-2022

The Arctic region, long characterised as a "zone of peaceful cooperation," has undergone a marked transformation in the period between 2008 and 2026, moving progressively from a domain of environmental governance towards one of intensifying strategic and military contestation. This paper seeks to examine the manner in which militarization has functioned not merely as a consequence of the broader European security crisis, but as an active multiplier that has compounded and accelerated the unravelling of EU-Russia Arctic relations, particularly in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. While much of the existing scholarship treats the securitisation of the Arctic as a downstream effect of the Ukraine war, this paper argues instead that militarisation ought to be understood as a distinct and self-reinforcing driver of crisis, one that has interacted with, and exacerbated, pre-existing tensions arising from climate change, resource competition, and institutional fragmentation in the region. The study adopts a quantitative and comparative methodology, wherein publicly available data on military expenditure, troop deployment, and defence infrastructure across the eight Arctic Council states drawn principally from SIPRI and national defence sources, shall be compiled and normalised on a year-wise basis for the period 2008-2026. This data shall be plotted alongside key inflection points, namely the 2008 Georgia conflict, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, and the 2022 invasion, so as to determine whether militarization trends correspond with, precede, or lag behind these broader geopolitical ruptures. The resultant trend-lines shall be examined descriptively, without recourse to complex inferential modelling, so as to render the analysis both methodologically transparent and accessible to a wider readership within political science. It is anticipated that the findings shall demonstrate a marked and disproportionate escalation in Arctic militarization from 2022 onward, one that substantially outpaces the rate of institutional adaptation on the part of both the European Union and the Arctic Council. This mismatch, it shall be argued, exemplifies the broader "polycrisis" condition wherein overlapping crises—security, climate, and governance—interact in ways that existing institutional frameworks are ill-equipped to address. In doing so, the paper contributes to ongoing debates within Australian and international political science circles regarding the utility of the polycrisis framework, while also offering a modest empirical corrective to the largely qualitative and discourse-driven literature that presently dominates Arctic geopolitical scholarship. The paper concludes by reflecting upon the implications of this militarization-as-multiplier thesis for the European Union's capacity to function as a coherent geopolitical actor in a region increasingly shaped by great-power competition, and by suggesting avenues for further quantitative research into the compounding dynamics of the Arctic polycrisis.