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Canada is intensifying military activity across its Arctic approaches as the strategic significance of northern shipping corridors continues to grow.
Canadian forces are currently participating in a series of operations stretching from the Bering Sea to the Northwest Passage and across the eastern approaches to the Canadian Arctic. The activity includes Operation NANOOK-TUUGAALIK, involving Canadian naval and coast guard forces alongside vessels from the United States, Denmark and France, and Operation NANOOK-NUNAKPUT, which begins on 17 August and will involve around 600 personnel conducting mobility and surveillance activities around the Northwest Passage.
In July, Canada conducted Operation LATITUDE with the United States in northern waters including the Bering Sea. Earlier this year, the largest NANOOK-NUNALIVUT winter exercise undertaken since the NANOOK series began in 2007 deployed almost 1,300 Canadian personnel across the North.
Individually these are sovereignty, surveillance and interoperability exercises. Collectively they reveal something more important: Canada and its allies are steadily increasing their ability to operate along the maritime geography connecting the Pacific, Canadian Arctic and North Atlantic.
That geography is becoming more strategically important as another Arctic corridor develops on the opposite side of the polar region.
Russia is accelerating use of the Northern Sea Route, running along its Arctic coast between European Russia and the Bering Strait. China is increasingly important to that strategy.
Canada's own Arctic Foreign Policy identifies growing Russia-China cooperation in the Arctic, while Canadian government assessments note that Russia has become China's principal gateway into the region. The two countries cooperate on the NSR, Arctic energy development and increasingly on military and coast guard activities.
The commercial dimension is becoming harder to separate from the strategic one.
Russia has already moved around six million barrels of crude toward Asia through the NSR during the opening weeks of the 2026 navigation season, with China the principal destination, according to Reuters. The route can shorten voyages between Russia and China by around two weeks compared with transit through the Suez Canal.
Chinese commercial use is also expanding. Russia's Rosatom said this month that it had approved seven Chinese vessels to transit the NSR toward Europe, following the successful China-Europe container voyage through the route in 2025.
Energy is pushing the corridor further. On 14 August, Russia's newly built Arc7 LNG carrier Konstantin Posiet began travelling through the NSR. The vessel was constructed for the sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project and represents another attempt by Moscow to sustain Arctic energy exports despite Western restrictions.
There is therefore an important distinction.
Canada is not confronting the Northern Sea Route directly. The NSR lies predominantly along Russia's Arctic coast, while Canadian operations are concentrated around Canada's own Arctic Archipelago, the Northwest Passage and its Atlantic and Pacific approaches.
But the two developments belong to the same strategic transformation.
On one side of the Arctic, Russia is constructing an increasingly Asia-facing energy and shipping corridor with China becoming its most important external partner. On the other, Canada and its NATO partners are expanding surveillance, mobility, maritime presence and interoperability around the Northwest Passage and the approaches connecting the Arctic to the Atlantic and Pacific.
The Bering Strait increasingly becomes the hinge between those systems.
For years, discussions about Arctic shipping focused largely on whether declining sea ice might eventually create commercially viable alternatives to Suez. The more consequential development may now be that the Arctic's emerging corridors are acquiring strategic architecture around them.
Shipping routes are becoming security spaces.
And that makes Canada's latest exercises about considerably more than operating soldiers and ships in the cold.
Dean Mikkelsen is Founder and Editorial Director of Power & Corridors. Based in Abu Dhabi, he focuses on geopolitical risk, maritime security, trade corridors, energy, logistics and critical infrastructure.
From Barentsburg to Severomorsk, surveillance, submarines and undersea infrastructure are converging around one of the North Atlantic’s least understood strategic passages
