Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says that Crimea is “no less important for the security of Russia than Greenland is for the US” (meduza.io/news/2026/01/20/lavrov-krym-ne-menee-vazhen-dlya-bezopasnosti-rossii-chem-grenlandiya-dlya-ssha), a comment that suggests Moscow believes Donald Trump will now be more supportive of Russia’s claims there.

Lavrov’s words have attracted attention around the world as talk about the possibility of a change in the status of Denmark’s Greenland, but relatively little attention is being devoted to a Moscow commentator who argues that “if the world allows the US to change Greenland’s status, Russia has the complete moral and historical right to revise the status” of Norway’s Svalbard.

Indeed, Nikolay Ilyasov says, Russia would simply be restoring the rights it has under a 1920 treaty that gave it the right to operate in Svalbard (Spitzbergen) at a time when Norway is turning the archipelago into an anti-Russian outpost........

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