On Spitsbergen there are so many polar bears that it’s against the law to leave town without carrying a gun.
The only inhabited island in the Svalbard archipelago, Spitsbergen is Norwegian territory.
But 30 miles from its capital, Longyearbyen (population 2,000), lies the town of Barentsburg, which is home to a community of Russian miners.
There the Moscow-owned Arktikugol company oversees a desultory coal-mining operation. The coal it produces is poor quality, and the cost of extracting it high, but the mine provides an invaluable excuse for the Kremlin to maintain a unique toehold within a Western sovereign territory.
And in the months and
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