Ice was still heavy on the water when the hulking Christophe de Margerie tanker set off on the first journey of the season along the Northern Sea Route in late May.
It had just stopped at a port connected to Arctic LNG-2, a US-sanctioned liquefied natural gas facility deep in the Russian Arctic, shipping data shows. From there, led most of the way by an icebreaker, the tanker lumbered through thousands of miles of Arctic waters and the Bering Sea.
Its roughly two-week trip ended at the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East, where the tanker slipped into a secluded bay that used to be home to a Soviet military settlement.
There, satellite imagery reviewed by CNN shows the Christophe de Margerie sidled up against a sprawling floating storage unit, in a formation typical of ship-to-ship cargo transfers. The tanker appeared to unload its blacklisted cargo into the unit, before beginning its journey back to the Arctic, Marine Traffic data shows.
Bound in impassible ice for much of the year and navigable without icebreakers for just a short summer window, the Moscow-controlled Northern Sea Route (NSR) is a controversial artery cutting through a region that’s increasingly cast as a new arena of great-power rivalry.
A CNN analysis of shipping data compiled by the Norway-based Centre for High North Logistics shows that, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, international transit along the route has been dominated by trade with one foreign player: China.
The trade – buttressing Russia’s wartime economy and boosting China’s energy security – comes alongside expanding Chinese shipping operations in the area, and growing concern in the West that China’s footprint there could foreshadow future military use.
A day after the Christophe de Margerie departed the Kamchatka Peninsula, a second US-sanctioned tanker – the Arctic Mulan – arrived at the mouth of the same bay. It loitered for several days before being tugged next to the same floating storage unit, where it switched off its tracking device for about a day, transponder data shows.
Cloudy skies made it hard for satellites to capture what happened next, but a day later the vessel’s transponder was back on and – likely now holding the Russian cargo – it began making its way to China’s Beihai port.
A satellite image captured 11 days later is assessed by CNN to show the Arctic Mulan docked at the southern Chinese port, where a terminal has “been ringfenced for taking in sanctioned Russian LNG cargoes” since last September, according to Charles Costerousse, a senior LNG analyst at trade intelligence firm Kpler.
Shipping data shows the transfer was repeated with the same vessels in July, underscoring how the NSR has emerged as a fast track for China to access the US-sanctioned fuel.
Now, as a US-led conflict – this time in the Middle East – has stranded oil and gas tankers and throttled global trade, China and Russia have been gearing up for what could be a record season along this alternative shipping route at the top of the globe.
For China, that also means a banner year in a region where it’s long wanted to expand its presence as a self-proclaimed “near-Arctic state” – and where melting ice could open up longer seasons and more routes in the decades to come.
“(China has) a huge frontier in front of them now,” said Daisuke Harada, director general of the energy business unit at the government-backed Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security, who is familiar with the Arctic LNG-2 development and China’s operations in the region.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long envisioned the 3,500-mile route along Russia’s jagged Arctic coastline becoming a major artery for trade – and a driver of investment in Russian ports and oil and gas fields.
In recent months, he’s claimed disruptions to trade due to fighting around the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz show the seasonal route is “the safest, the most reliable and efficient.”
Chinese leader Xi Jinping, too, has for years dreamed of a “polar silk road” across the Arctic, an icy extension of his flagship Belt and Road infrastructure drive. Pitched by Xi in 2018, the plan would project China’s influence in the region from Russia to Scandinavia or beyond.
But the expected massive Chinese investment in polar ports and infrastructure never materialized. And high costs and risky conditions along the route had already complicated Putin’s vision – even before Russia’s war against Ukraine drove international players from its Arctic territory. China’s state-owned shipping and energy giants, too, backed away.
Even still, the situation has created a “window of opportunity” for Beijing, according to Marc Lanteigne, a professor at the University of Tromsø: The Arctic University of Norway. That’s to use its leverage as the principal partner helping Moscow develop the route to build out its role in the Arctic.
This weekend an upstart Singapore-incorporated, Chinese-run shipping line – Sea Legend – is expected to launch the first regularly scheduled container service operating seasonally between China and Europe – advertising a 20-day transit time, or about half of a standard Suez route, while “avoiding geopolitical disruption risks.”
Another Chinese company, New New Shipping, also formed in the wake of Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion, last month launched a new line from China’s Tianjin to Russia’s largest Arctic port Murmansk. That adds to New New’s existing services sending Chinese industrial goods in one direction and Russian raw materials in the other.
All told, at least six Chinese shipping companies are expected to make more than 50 voyages along the route this season, using container, bulk and multipurpose vessels, with the vast majority of transits running between China and Russia, according to schedules posted by the China Shipowners’ Association.
When it comes to cargo, “China and Russia now are the only ones who are really using this (route) now – they see this very much as part of their close cooperation,” said Kjell Stokvik, managing director of the Centre for High North Logistics (CHNL) at Norway’s Nord University, which tracks NSR traffic.
Trade along the route remains tiny compared with major throughways like the Suez Canal and is dominated by Russian oil and gas, which – along with a few other LNG buyers in Asia – principally flow to China.
China’s imports of LNG from Russia across all routes surged nearly 28% in the first half of the year by volume as LNG exports from the Middle East froze due to the US-Iran war. (Europe remains by far the largest buyer of Russian LNG from non-sanctioned facilities like Yamal LNG, but not via NSR transit. An impending EU ban on seaborne Russian LNG purchases in 2027 will change that.)
Each of the eight oil tankers that made full transits of the NSR last year directly bound for China had been blacklisted by the US for ferrying sanctioned cargoes, according to a CNN analysis of CHNL shipping data, based on vessel registration identification numbers.
And a proliferation of so-called shadow fleet vessels, often older ships using evasive techniques, are driving up environmental risks along the route – fueled by demand from the world’s second-largest economy, experts say.
Analysts and industry insiders also say Chinese entities have quietly supplied key equipment to the heavily US-sanctioned Arctic LNG-2 facility. The project’s foreign investors, which included two Chinese state-owned enterprises, as well as France’s TotalEnergies and a Japanese consortium, have frozen or exited their stakes.
China’s involvement in the project, as well as Russia’s Yamal LNG project, is providing its firms with “precious knowledge,” said Harada of the Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security, which was one of the foreign partners that froze its stake in Arctic LNG-2. “They are learning in an effective way.”
The main reason China has been able to play this role is Washington’s lack of follow-up on sanctions, according to energy analyst Kjell Eikland, director of Eikland Energy AS. “It’s hard to overstate the role of China for Russia when it comes to energy trade along the route,” he said.
But the West has been paying attention.
US President Donald Trump has raised the specter of Russian and Chinese ships patrolling North Atlantic waters near Greenland to justify his threat of the US forcibly taking over the Danish island territory – an issue that has triggered a historic rift with Washington’s NATO allies in Europe. Washington has also inked a shipbuilding deal with Finland to expand the US icebreaker fleet, as it’s watched Beijing expand its own.
The EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas earlier this year warned China could weaponize Arctic shipping routes and supply chains. NATO chief Mark Rutte in July said the alliance must coordinate to address a “huge risk that Russia and China will gain more and more access to the Arctic.”
Western observers have been alarmed by signs of a nascent expansion of China-Russia security cooperation in the high north, including a joint bomber exercise near Alaska and a joint coast guard operation in Arctic waters, both in 2024.
They also say Chinese research missions, like the current deployment of its growing polar fleet to the region for a four-month expedition, could provide crucial data to the Chinese military. A research deployment last year included sending submersibles beneath Arctic ice.
Beijing has repeatedly pushed back on such claims, which it says are intended to hype up the “China threat” and sow division in the region. It defends its activities in the Arctic as “aimed at promoting peace, stability, and sustainable development” in accordance with international law. Beijing has also long defended its trade with its close partner Russia and it rejects unilateral sanctions.
Moscow, meanwhile, is widely seen as remaining wary of opening the door for Chinese security engagement in the Arctic, hoping instead that China will continue to buy up energy and broaden its role building out a lucrative NSR.
On a sunny September day last year in the Chinese port city of Ningbo, not far from Shanghai, higher-ups from shipping company Sea Legend mingled with local transport officials at a port terminal.
They’d gathered under the quay cranes to applaud and snap photos of the big moment: the loading of the final shipping container onto the Istanbul Bridge, a cargo ship bound for Britain.
Now that trial journey, which took roughly 20 days, is slated to become a regular shipping line for the first time, aiming to ferry Chinese-made electric and hybrid cars, lithium batteries, and solar power products to Europe. This weekend’s voyage is the first of eight bound for Europe this season.
The goal is to provide reliable logistics “in the face of the current complex and volatile international situation,” Sea Legend CEO Li Xiaobin said , according to an interview published in Chinese financial journal Caixin last October.
Earlier this month, the head of Russia’s nuclear agency Rosatom Alexey Likhachev hailed the “full-fledged liner service” as the “next step” in developing regular, seasonal shipping to Europe. Rosatom operates the NSR.
Both Sea Legend and New New Shipping have only begun running the route in recent years – after China’s state-owned shipping behemoth COSCO joined other international shippers in pulling back in 2022.
Using new, privately held companies for Arctic forays may be a sign of caution on the part of Beijing, said China-Russia expert Elizabeth Wishnick, a senior research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses in the US. Transiting the route, while not in violation of Western sanctions itself, can incur risks of dealing with blacklisted firms. “(China) had to create new companies to avoid sanctions,” Wishnick said.
New New Shipping, which has been operating along the route since 2023, attracted international attention after one of its vessels, the New New Polar Bear, allegedly damaged submarine cables and a pipeline in the Baltic Sea that year. The ship’s captain has pleaded not guilty to charges including criminal damage in a case set to be heard early next year in Hong Kong, where the company is registered.
New New Shipping’s business in the Arctic has been driven by Russian trade, and the company has not shied away from those links, with its officials frequently appearing at meetings in Russia and reportedly in talks to partner on the construction of a deepwater project at an Arctic port.
A handful of other Chinese shipping companies have also entered the route in the past year. But for all operators, voyages remain limited and are highly seasonal. In the case of those to Europe, with which China has a vast trade surplus, there’s also the question of how viable the route is both ways.
But the shippers are ambitious. In comments to reporters this week, Sea Legend said it aimed to achieve “year-round navigation” of the Arctic route within the coming decade.
Questions of viability have always loomed over the route, and the dreams of the leaders seeking to develop it. Even before the Ukraine war, international shipping giants were skeptical and the route remains controversial.
Transit requires registration with an agency under Russia’s Rosatom. The seasonal window is short. Conditions along the route can change quickly – and it’s not unheard of for ships to get stuck in ice and need to call for help, even in the summer season when vessels can cross without ice specifications or icebreaker escorts.
“Predictability is something you have to think of if you want to operate a sea line, and the issue here is that there are different conditions that cause delay,” said Stokvik of the CHNL in Norway.
The high risk of – and challenges of addressing – oil spills and other safety incidents in the hostile Arctic climate are another dissuading factor, as are environmental costs of operating there. A number of major international logistics firms have signed a pledge eschewing the route due to “potentially devastating environmental impacts” of increased vessel traffic in the region.
But governments are also aware that as ice melts in the coming decades, transit seasons could extend and additional routes can open up, such as a potential trans-polar route that avoids Russian coastlines altogether. For China, that could provide a fast track to the North Atlantic.
And other Asian nations are looking at how to expand their Arctic capabilities, including through shipping along the NSR.
South Korean shipping line PanStar is gearing up for a planned August 22 test trip from Busan to Europe via the NSR, after South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said the country was determined to “lead in opening the era of Northern Sea Route.”
As pioneers of these shipping lines, Chinese firms – including COSCO in the past – have a “certain comparative advantage,” according to Zhao Long, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Strategic and Security Studies in Shanghai – especially for a future point when the “geopolitical situation normalizes.”
At such a time, he predicted, “there will be another wave of Chinese companies going to Russia to do more investments in the Russian Arctic.”
CNN’s Fred He, Yoonjung Seo, Chris Lau and Anna Chernova contributed to this report.
