When U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin emerged from a historic summit in Geneva on Wednesday, both leaders mentioned the promise of good U.S.-Russia relations in the Arctic. In a press conference following the three-hour meeting, Putin pointed to the Arctic as a zone of understanding between the U.S. and Russia, while in a separate press conference Biden said the leaders discussed how to ensure “the Arctic remains a region of cooperation rather than conflict.”

“Yes, this issue was discussed in a wide format and a pretty detailed way, Vladimir Putin told the press after his meeting with Joe Biden. “It is a very important, interesting topic in the sense that the development of the Arctic in general and the Northern Sea Route in specific is of huge interest for the economy of many countries, including countries from outside the region,” he underlined in a press conference held after the bilateral talks.

Member of the Federation Council and RAIPN President Grigory Ledkov has come up with a proposal to modify the existing procedure whereby the indigenous peoples of the North are registered. His idea is that people should be registered where they actually are. “The next issue is registering the nomads. In 2011, it was decided to register them at the nearest settlements, but this was only a temporary measure intended to take the edge off the problem and to enable people to get Russian Federation passports, because they had been denied these as they were not registered.

The Pentagon’s 2022 budget is light on funding for defending the Arctic, but Defense Department officials expect future funding requests to rise with the region’s growing importance. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, testifying before the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee June 17, said the current fiscal 2022 request provides only “some capability” for the Arctic, adding, “We have to better resource our Arctic efforts in the future.”

For the first time, a Regional Conference on Permafrost will be combined with the bi-annual 19th International Conference on Cold Regions Engineering. This conference is hosted by the US Permafrost Association, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the International Permafrost Association, the Permafrost Young Researchers Network, and the University of Colorado Boulder. A complete list of planned sessions is available here.

Organizers announce, that due to the coronavirus outbreak, the 2nd Symposium on Polar Microbes and Viruses has been postponed to 2022. This symposium will bring together molecular microbial ecologists specializing in different organism groups to share our latest results and discuss methodological problems, as well as future prospects in the field, including practical international collaborations. The environmental focus will be on cryospheric environments including sea ice, glaciers, ice sheets, and permafrost, but excellent research in other polar environments is also invited. The methods to be discussed will focus on 'omics' techniques, ranging from single cells to metagenomes, but research using additional methods is encouraged as well.