Exhibitions
MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator...
the east, across the Bering Strait from Alaska. The apex is the North Pole. This triangle covers 1.2 million square kilometers, an area the size of Italy, Germany and France put together. Generally speaking, we have always considered it our own. Starting in the 1920s, this sector was marked as Soviet and later Russian territorial waters on all the country's maps.At least, this was the case before the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea limited us to a 200-mile economic zone along our coast. Having ratified it in 1997, we immediately lost our right to the rest of the Arctic Ocean, including our chunk of the North Pole. Other countries, not only those ringing the Arctic, laid claims to what we had lost. This is understandable. According to some estimates, the continental shelf holds about 100 billion tons of oil plus a wealth of fish species. Moreover, the Northern Sea Route, running through the Arctic Ocean along Russia's northern coast, is the shortest way from
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