September 16, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ben Taub’s “The Dark Time,” a detailed look into the espionage war currently being fought on the border between Russia and Norway. Taub visits the Norwegian border town of Kirkenes. “In the context of nuclear escalation,” he says, “Kirkenes is in one of the most strategically sensitive regions on earth.” The other side of the border is the Kola Peninsula, “which is filled with closed military towns and airfields, nuclear-weapons storage facilities, and nuclear-submarine ports.” He attends a NATO military exercise called Cold Response, in which some thirty thousand troops were practicing Arctic warfare. He visits a watchtower that overlooks the Russian town of Nikel. He traverses roughly seventy kilometres of the border – 

mostly in snowshoes, occasionally in boots or on skis—and bunked with conscripts in remote outposts whose walls were coated in ice. The border region is a place where everyday life is imbued with geopolitical significance, where the stakes are visible in what little infrastructure exists amid the vast, unyielding wilderness: radar balls, listening stations, relay towers, a microwave-communications network for the military. On a patrol last November, to monitor the border in the mountains overlooking Russia’s Pechenga valley, two conscripts and I experienced total whiteout, and could hardly distinguish ground from sky. It was just freezing whiteness, minus twenty degrees Celsius—a void. Shortly after midday, everything faded to blue and gray, then to black.

In one of the piece’s most memorable passages, Taub joins a U.S. Navy crew for a mission aboard a P-8 Poseidon, “one of the world’s most advanced submarine-hunting aircraft.” The plane is piloted by Sandeep Arakali, a twenty-eight-year-old aerospace engineer. Taub describes the P-8 engaging in an air-to-air refuelling:

Arakali approached the stratotanker from behind and from slightly below. The tanker filled the P-8’s cockpit windows—four huge jet engines, spanning my peripheral vision. Arakali leaned over the controls and craned his neck upward. His hands shook wildly, compensating for forces that I could not see; in relation to the stratotanker, the P-8 seemed perfectly still. A young woman, lying prone in the stratotanker’s tail, stared back at him, her face framed by a small triangular window, as she guided a fuel line into the top of the P-8. There was a rush of liquid above us—two tons per minute. Then the line detached, and Arakali descended over the Barents Sea.

Everywhere Taub goes, he talks with people – Johan Roaldsnes, Norwegian regional counterintelligence chief; Frederick Hodnefjell, company commander; Thomas Nilsen, journalist; Tor Ivar Dahl Pettersen, air-ambulance pilot; Frode Berg, a Norwegian former border inspector; Kari Aga Myklebøst, Barents Chair in Russian Studies at the Arctic University of Norway; Harold Sunde, a member of Kirkenes’s municipal council; Georgii Chentemirov, a journalist exiled from Russia who settled in Kirkenes; to name a few. 

Reading “The Dark Time” is an immersive experience. Taub puts us squarely there – in Kirkenes, in the P-8 Poseidon, in the cold, dark Norwegian Arctic. My take-away from this great piece? Make no mistake, Russia is at war with the West.