Features | Environment | East Asia

Asia Is Racing to the Arctic, But It’s Not Easy

The political momentum for the Northern Sea Route is real. However, the actual data looks a lot less rosy.

From Seoul to Singapore, Asian capitals are suddenly treating the Arctic as the next frontier of global shipping. South Korea has committed over $400 million to Arctic maritime infrastructure and plans to send a trial container vessel from Busan to Rotterdam this September, aiming to cut the journey from 40 days via Suez to around 20. Japan is updating its Arctic strategy and deepening diplomatic engagement. Singapore – a city-state with no Arctic territory – has an Arctic ambassador. Russian President Vladimir Putin met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in late 2025 and Arctic shipping was on the agenda. Russia’s Rosatom has signed cooperation agreements with DP World of Dubai and courted India on Northern Sea Route (NSR) logistics. 

As the Arctic rises on the European agenda, with the European Union currently in the process of updating its Arctic policy, Asia is already moving faster on specific business development, focusing on the opportunities that Arctic shipping may present. The political momentum is real. However, the shipping data, less so.

The Route Everyone Wants, Almost Nobody Uses

The NSR – hugging Russia’s Arctic coastline from the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait – is the corridor at the center of all this ambition. On paper, it cuts roughly 7,000 kilometers off the Asia-Europe journey compared to the Suez Canal. In practice, it remains a seasonal, politically fraught, infrastructure-dependent niche route.

In 2025, the NSR handled 103 transit voyages carrying approximately 3.2 million tonnes of cargo – a record, but a modest one. The Suez Canal, even while under severe pressure from Houthi attacks in the Red Sea that cut traffic by over 60 percent, still handled more than 12,000 transits that year. 

Russia’s own ambitions for the route have been revised downward repeatedly. In 2018, Russia set a target of 80 million tonnes by 2024; that eventually became 100 million by various later deadlines. Actual 2025 volumes came in around 37 million tonnes, most of it Russian hydrocarbons moving east. 

Allianz Commercial’s Safety and Shipping Review 2026 – while acknowledging the route’s time-saving potential – warned that the Arctic “remains one of the highest-risk environments for commercial shipping,” with sanctions and geopolitics posing as much of a barrier as the ice itself. Western majors – Maersk, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd – have effectively withdrawn, citing sanctions risk, insurance costs, and environmental concerns.

Even COSCO, China’s state shipping giant, has not sailed the NSR since 2022. That leaves two small and largely unknown Chinese companies – Sealegend Shipping and New New Shipping Line – as the most prominent non-Russian operators on the route. Between them, they managed 14 container voyages via the Arctic in 2025, up from 11 the year before. 

Operating on the NSR means engaging directly with Rosatom as the route’s sole infrastructure operator, navigating U.S. secondary sanctions risks, and accepting dependence on Russian icebreaker escorts for much of the sailing season. For a company with substantial Western commercial exposure, that is not an easy equation. Sealegend and New New Shipping, operating outside that exposure, can take the risk. The world’s major carriers – including COSCO – cannot.

Japan’s Arctic engagement illustrates the complexity behind the headline interest. Mitsui O.S.K. Lines (MOL), the country’s largest shipping company and a longstanding investor in Russian LNG infrastructure, was forced to modify charter contracts for four Arctic vessels following U.S. and EU sanctions on the Arctic LNG 2 project, taking losses in the process. Japan’s state energy investor JOGMEC remains entangled in a project it can neither exit cleanly nor easily develop. 

Yet Japan has not been scared away: it is building a new Arctic research icebreaker, updating its Arctic strategy, and deepening engagement across science, governance, and – cautiously – resource access. Japan’s ambitions are clear; their commercial viability, less so.

Meanwhile, the Arctic shipping map is about to be redrawn not by melting ice, but by sanctions legislation drafted in Brussels. The single biggest driver of Arctic shipping growth over the past decade has not been climate change. It has been one industrial project: the Yamal LNG plant on Russia’s Yamal Peninsula, which generates the gas tanker traffic that dominates the NSR. As recently as February 2026, the........

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