Berg’s arrest left much of Norway wondering how a pensioner from an Arctic border town became entangled in the country’s first case of alleged espionage in Russia since World War II. Meanwhile, his case has also placed a renewed focus on the deepening anxiety gripping the historically peaceful border between Norway and Russia.

Berg was a resident of Kirkenes, a town of about 3,500 people not far from Norway’s 121-mile border with Russia. The Arctic town worked to build a close relationship with its Russian neighbors, even as tensions between Moscow and the West rose in recent years. Berg himself volunteered at a soup kitchen across the border and helped organize festivals and sporting events open to both Norwegians and Russians. Risnes said that those connections to Russia are part of what may have made his client attractive to Norwegian intelligence.

The spy case has also drawn new attention to Oslo’s activities in the north. A report by Norway’s national broadcaster NRK found that Berg wasn’t the only resident in the north to be approached by Norwegian intelligence in recent years: A number of locals who regularly cross the border said that they’ve been asked to serve as couriers for information or cash to and from Russia. The recruitment efforts, NRK reported, have increased in recent years.

All this places Norway, which prides itself a peaceful nation, in an awkward position. Oslo serves as the West’s eyes and ears on Russia’s northern border, conducting physical and electronic surveillance for NATO and the United States. But while Norway and its allies have grown increasingly suspicious of the Kremlin, Oslo has also tried to prevent its relationship with Moscow from roiling the people-to-people ties that have developed on both sides of the border since the fall of the Soviet Union. “We have placed a lot of emphasis on this even while the larger Russia-West relationship is strained,” Ine Eriksen Søreide, Norway’s foreign minister, told me. The two countries have a long history of cooperation, especially in the Arctic, on issues like search and rescue, the lucrative fishing and oil industries, and among their border-guard agencies. “It’s part of the overall strategy to keep the Russian relationship balanced and keep our surroundings stable,” Søreide said.

Norway’s experiment with forging closer cross-border ties was born out of the hope that after 1991, Western countries could build a more peaceful and prosperous future with Russia. Over the years, those efforts paid off—thanks in part to the steadfast engagement of people like Berg. Russian firms opened offices in Kirkenes, as cross-border events and festivals became more common, and Russian shoppers flocked to local shops thanks to a visa-free travel agreement for locals that came into effect in 2012. “These low-level cooperative channels where people seem to gain more knowledge about each other are important,” Lars Rowe, a Russia expert at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, told me. “It’s seen as a way to create peace.”