Radek Sikorski’s diary: Show Putin what you think of him – eat a Polish apple

I made a welcome escape from sweltering Warsaw to the cloudy cool of Bodø, halfway up the coast of Norway, north of Iceland. Bodø’s harbour stays ice-free all year round only thanks to the Gulf Stream. The fjords bubble with whirlpools and offer some of the best cold-water scuba diving in the world. When the mist clears, the air in this visibly prosperous place has an Alpine, colour-enhancing quality. It’s my first time beyond the Arctic circle and the dusk through the night makes it hard to sleep. ‘Now imagine,’ says the wife over the phone from Washington, ‘what it was like to try to go to sleep in a Soviet-era hotel in Vorkuta, in late June, without curtains.’

During our talks, Norway’s genial foreign minister, Børge Brende, gets feedback on his decision to join EU sanctions on Russia over Ukraine. The social democratic opposition leader, Jonas Store, backs him. But on a boat ride to see eagles nesting, Brende’s phone heats up with messages from his opponents on the right. During the Cold War, the right resisted Bolshevism. Today’s hard right loves Putinism. They don’t have an ideology exactly, but they do have a slogan: ‘Enemies of liberal democracy, competitive markets, gays and the EU, unite!’

In Reitan, not far from Bødo, we visit Norway’s National Joint Headquarters, a vast bunker carved 300 metres into a mountain, originally constructed by the Germans using POWs. Huge screens show activity all over the Arctic: Russian strategic bombers, nuclear submarines, ICBMs aimed at the US. Russia’s new gas and oil fields, abundant fisheries, traffic through the northern route to the Far East, even coalfields in Spitsbergen make the Arctic denser with military and economic activity than ever before. In addition, the long northern border between Russia and Norway probably demarcates the widest gap in standard of living across any international border: the Russian Arctic is as impoverished as the Norwegian Arctic is rich.