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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Kirkenes-Nikel
Foreign Ministry‘s assistance. Nevertheless, these would-be ‗treaty-making‘ activities of the
municipalities were one of the most effective instruments both to build their capacities and
strengthen their international prestige.
Twinning Strategies: Problem-Solving/Functional Cooperation
The Kirkenes-Nikel twinning project aims to help these towns solve the numerous problems they
face and promote their further sustainable development. Their cooperation covers the following
areas:
Industrial cooperation.
It is, more particularly, connected to the Norwegian Pomor Plan, i.e. a plan
initiated by Norwegian experts in 2006 and aiming at the establishment of a Pomor Special
Industrial Zone (PSIZ) in the Sør-Varanger community/Pechenga district on the border region but
potentially also transcending the Norwegian-Russian border (Cherednichenko, 2008).
One of the prime aims of establishing a PSIZ consisted of facilitating the development and use of
the Shtokman gas field in the Barents Sea among other things by providing a major bulk of the
required regional transport infrastructure and construction of a plant for production of liquid gas.
Russia and Norway have also decided to connect some of their gas pipelines in the Barents Sea area,
and in bringing the pipeline on land, an appendage might also reach Nikel (so the nickel depositories
could be processed on spot rather than traded on the world market as raw material as has been the
case so far). The plans to build metallurgy and oil refinery plants on the coast of the Pechenga Bay
were mentioned as well (
Pechenga
, 2008). These activities open up some interesting prospects also for
the part of twinning.
Developing transport infrastructure
: There was also a project to build a 40-km railroad from Nikel to
Kirkenes. Such a connection would be needed in order to switch a part of a broader flow of goods
(coming from the Far East and Russia‘s High North to Europe and North America
via
Murmansk)
to Kirkenes. A special company, the World Port Kirkenes Group AS, was established in Norway in
2001. According to the company‘s plans, the link should be created not only to the Russian but also
to the Finnish railway system and the connection between Kirkenes, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk
ports should be established (World Port Kirkenes Group, 2002: 11). However, the Murmansk
regional authorities have been reserved about this project because they did not want to transform
Kirkenes to a world-class port capable of being a competitor to the Murmansk harbors. Instead they
proposed a plan of radical reconstruction of the Murmansk port to receive the growing flow of
goods. Owing to competitive interests, the railway project has made little progress, and instead Oslo
has been pushing for the exploration of the viability of a railroad from Rovaniemi (Finland) to
Tromsø or Finnmark county (including Kirkenes) in order to develop an alternative version of the
transport corridor (Regnum, 2009). According to the Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre
(2010), the plan is being assessed ―on a serious basis‖.
The regional authorities are modernizing the E-105 highway from Murmansk to Kirkenes (
via
the
Borisoglebsk-Storskog border-crossing) and building several shortcuts that bypass Pechenga and