For the past decade Russia has been engaged in modernizing and upgrading existing Arctic bases and building new ones. It now maintains a network of more than a dozen bases from the Kola peninsula in the west to the Bering Strait in the east.

The airbase near the town of Tiksi is the latest base to receive modern military hardware further expanding a protective shield of anti-aircraft weapons along Russia’s Northern Sea Route.

The base received a shipment of S-300 missiles and support hardware in August 2019 when two vessels, the Sevmorput and the Valery Vasilyev, arrived from Arkhangelsk. The unit was first activated for training purposes in December 2019 and a collection of eleven military buildings, including dormitories, administrative buildings, power plants, fuel storage, and missile control room were completed in February.

Equipment arrives at Tiksi

Originally, Tiksi was supposed to receive the more modern S-400 system as early as 2015, but according to a recent report by CSIS, a think tank in Washington DC, these announcements were overblown.

“Despite the many announcements, these military systems do not appear in the satellite images analyzed. While this does not rule out the possibility that they will be stationed on Tiksi in the future, it is important to note that Russian statements about Tiksi may be overblown. In fact, satellite images acquired between 2013 and 2019 show very little construction,” explain experts at the think tank.

While other bases such as the Nagurskoye air base on the Franz Josef Land Archipelago and the Temp air base on Kotelny Island received major expansions, including the so-called “Arctic Trefoil” buildings, Tiksi appeared to be of lower priority.

