In Russian public discourse, the Arctic is framed as a space of opportunity — for oil and gas extraction on the continental shelf and transport via the Northern Sea Route. This vision raises two key challenges: extending Russia’s shelf claim to the North Pole and overcoming technological limitations. Addressing these challenges requires expertise, which the state seeks from compliant academics and research institutions.

One prominent example is geographer Nikolai Kasimov, who promoted the creation of a National Arctic Atlas to represent the newly established Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation, a special economic region designed to concentrate Arctic development. A parallel case involves Rosneft, whose leadership complained that foreign organisations often controlled Arctic research conducted in Russia. In response, Rosneft launched its own research in partnership with ExxonMobil and later with Innopraktika, led by Vladimir Putin’s daughter, producing the atlas "The Russian Arctic" to showcase the company’s activities.

These cases illustrate how political and economic elites co-opt scientific expertise to legitimise their Arctic projects. A further dimension is the Russian adaptation of the international discourse of “sustainable development.” As Elana Wilson Rowe notes, elites and state-aligned scientists invoke the concept of sustainability to argue that Arctic development can be environmentally safe. Yet this rhetoric masks the contradiction that fossil fuel extraction accelerates climate change and threatens the very region it claims to protect. While most Russian climate scientists accept the anthropogenic causes of climate change, some researchers are nonetheless drawn into these state and corporate agendas.

My paper examines how atlases and sustainability rhetoric function as tools through which elites instrumentalise geographic knowledge and environmental discourse to advance extractive ambitions in the Arctic.