In less than a fortnight, President Donald Trump’s push to annex Greenland has done what Moscow long struggled to achieve: drive a wedge between the United States and its European allies in NATO. As Europe recoiled, Russia watched—and encouraged—the rift, framing the controversy as proof that the post–Cold War transatlantic order is fracturing under its own contradictions.
Moscow’s messaging has been blunt and opportunistic. Russian state media has amplified the notion that the alliance is wobbling, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov used his annual foreign policy address to cast doubt on Denmark’s sovereignty over the island. “Greenland is not a natural part of Denmark,” Lavrov said, calling it “a colonial acquisition” and grouping it with other far-flung territories administered by European powers. He notably declined to label Trump’s demands to annex Greenland—over the objections of its people—as colonialism in its own right. Instead, he invited a strained comparison: Crimea.
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“Crimea is no less important for the national security of Russia than Greenland for the national security of the U.S.,” Lavrov argued. The analogy collapses under scrutiny—the annexation of Crimea followed a military occupation and a widely rejected referendum, while Greenland’s modern status is defined by Danish sovereignty and expanded home rule—but the point of the comparison lies less in legal precision than in geopolitical signaling. Moscow wants Washington to treat Russia’s claims in its neighborhood with the same latitude the U.S. expects for itself in the Arctic.
President Vladimir Putin, addressing Russia’s Security Council, affected indifference. Greenland’s future, he said, was of no concern to Moscow, even as Trump warned that Russia could threaten the island if the U.S. did not control it. Putin then gestured to history, citing Russia’s sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867 and Denmark’s sale of the Virgin Islands in 1917 as reminders that territories have been bought and sold before. The subtext was clear: questions of sovereignty can be transactional, especially when major powers see strategic stakes.
Those stakes in the Arctic are real—and growing. Greenland’s rare earth minerals are valuable in a world racing for secure supply chains. Warming seas are lengthening the navigable season for Arctic shipping lanes, with routes north of Greenland promising to shorten transit times and cut costs, if only marginally at first. A larger U.S. footprint on the island—military, economic, or both—would eventually rub up against Russia’s own ambitions in what one analyst called “one of the major theaters of the future.” Competition among the U.S., Russia and China for influence over emerging Arctic corridors is no longer theoretical; it is a planning assumption in all three capitals.
If the Arctic explains the terrain, Ukraine explains the timing. The Kremlin has been careful to mute criticism of Trump’s Greenland gambit because it sees diplomatic leverage elsewhere. “Russia will try to exploit this, to persuade the Americans to agree to their version of a peace deal that would be catastrophic for Ukraine,” Witold Rodkiewicz, a Russian foreign policy analyst, told RTÉ News. Moscow’s logic is straightforward: anything that sours U.S.-Europe coordination on core security issues is bound to weaken Europe’s hand in negotiations over Ukraine, where unity on sanctions and security guarantees constrains Russia’s options.
The playbook is familiar. Earlier this month, Russia dialed down its rhetoric about U.S. moves in the Western Hemisphere, an apparent bid to keep channels open on what matters most to the Kremlin. “Russia is preoccupied with Ukraine. That’s an absolute and utmost priority and it’s imperative for them to deal with Ukraine,” Volodymyr Dubovyk, a U.S. foreign policy expert at Odesa National University, told RTÉ News. “Everything else doesn’t matter… The Russians are trying to curry favor with Trump on Greenland and basically praise him, and that’s not going to go unnoticed in Washington.”
That praise has taken a curious form. Lavrov’s colonial framing echoed Moscow’s effort, through its “Group of Friends in Defense of the UN Charter,” to present Russia and allied autocracies as defenders of decolonization. Yet the omission at the heart of that argument—refusing to describe unilateral annexation over local opposition as colonialism—reveals the instrumental nature of the rhetoric. The target is not decolonization, but Western cohesion.
Trump’s description of Greenland as a “big, beautiful piece of ice” during his remarks at Davos captured both the strategic magnetism of the island and the transactional style that unsettled European allies. For Denmark and Greenland’s self-rule government, the message was jarring: decades of alliance management and democratic consultation yielded to a bid-and-buy overture. For NATO, it was another shock to the system, as simmering disputes over burden-sharing and Ukraine strategy ran headlong into the politics of territorial acquisition.
To call this a Russian victory is premature. Enhanced U.S. interest in the Arctic—if it translates into sustained investment, expanded presence at bases like Thule, and deeper ties with Greenlandic institutions—could complicate Russian operations in the High North. Moscow has spent years fortifying Arctic infrastructure, expanding icebreaker fleets, and fly-wheeling Northern Fleet exercises. A more assertive American posture could challenge Russian control of choke points and surveillance coverage along the Northern Sea Route.
But in the near term, the Kremlin sees an opening. Trump’s revived talk of a hemispheric focus—what he now calls the “Donroe Doctrine,” a riff on the 1823 Monroe Doctrine—suggests a U.S. foreign policy more inward to the Americas and more skeptical of European entanglements. For Russia, which has long sought a multipolar world in which Western dominance is diluted, this tilt is welcome. It promises room to maneuver in Ukraine and the Caucasus, and space to test red lines in the Arctic without facing a fully harmonized Western response.
The actual fate of Greenland, for now, remains unchanged. Danish sovereignty stands, and Greenland’s people ultimately will decide their future within the framework of self-rule. Yet the politics unleashed by Washington’s gambit will linger. They will shape how Europe calculates risk, how NATO prioritizes theaters, and how Russia times its next moves. They also underscore a hardening reality: the Arctic is no longer a distant frontier. It is where climate, commerce and power converge—and where missteps reverberate quickly across alliances.
Russia’s posture—public detachment, private calculation—is not disinterest. It is a bet that the controversy over Greenland will yield dividends in Ukraine and in the broader contest to redefine the rules. Whether that bet pays off will depend less on what is said in Moscow than on what Washington and Europe can still say, and do, together.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
