Virtually all economic and social contacts between the West and Russia have now been frozen. An exception is the Norwegian-Russian fisheries cooperation in the Norwegian Sea. If it stops, the world’s most important cod stocks are once again threatened with overfishing.
Russian fishing boats in Kirkenes harbor in Norway.
“We must not burn all bridges,” said Norway’s Minister for Trade and Industry, Jan Christian Vestre, when he visited the northern Norwegian coastal town of Kirkenes in early spring, which lies almost directly on the border with Russia. That was two weeks after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which caught and shocked the West.