Russia and Norway ended a 40-year dispute yesterday when they signed an Arctic border treaty, opening up the region to offshore oil and gas development.
Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev and Jens Stoltenberg, the premier of Norway, attended the signing in Murmansk, a Russian Barents Sea port near the Norwegian border.
The disputed territory in the Barents Sea covered 175,000 square kilometres—roughly half the size of Germany—between the Novaya Zemlya archipelago on the Russian side and the Svlabard archipelago on the Norwegian side.