News analysis

Melting Arctic now faces geopolitical heat

The rapid melting of the ice-bound region is opening it up to the prospect of not just much more commercial shipping, but also militarisation. PHOTO: AFP
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WASHINGTON - The transformative Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev who died this week at 91, ended the Cold War and won the Nobel Prize for Peace.

But his dream of the remote, mostly frozen Arctic as a "zone of peace" probably died with him.

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