The explorers who planted the Russian flag beneath the North Pole were given a heroes’ welcome yesterday in defiance of the international condemnation of Moscow’s territorial claims.

Russia released the first pictures of the moment the tricolour was placed on the Arctic shelf at a depth of more than two and a half miles in a mission intended to advance the country’s claims over the region’s vast untapped mineral resources. It announced on Thursday that two of its submarines had successfully reached the bottom of the Arctic Ocean under the pole. But the symbolic planting of a rust-proof titanium Russian flag drew scornful responses from Western nations with Arctic ambitions.

“I’m not sure whether they’ve put a metal flag, a rubber flag or a bed sheet on the ocean floor,” Tom Casey, spokesman for the US State Department, said, affecting uncharacteristic jollity. “Either way, it doesn’t have any legal standing or effect on this claim.”

Earlier, Peter Mackay, the Canadian Foreign Minister, had remarked on television: “Look this isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this’.” Canada and the US are among four other Arctic nations, including Denmark and Norway, that challenge Russia’s claim to the seabed, thought to contain a quarter of the world’s remaining oil reserves.

The Russians launched the mission to produce scientific evidence to advance their claims but the symbolic planting of the flag, intending to mark the territory as theirs, proved a step too far. Sergei Lavrorv, the Russian Foreign Minister, pronounced himself “amazed” at the international reaction, saying: “We’re not throwing flags around. We know what we can prove.”

Russia’s claim to more than one million square kilometres of Artic seabed was turned down in 2001 for lack of evidence to prove that the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater shelf that runs through the Artic, was an extension of Russia’s own continental shelf. The submarine mission was sent to collect samples from the seabed to make a sound geological case for that claim.

Under the UN Law of the Sea treaty, a country’s claim to the mineral resources of the seabed may extend up to 200 miles beyond the end of its continental shelf, giving Russia, Canada, the US, Norway and Denmark a share each.

Russia’s claim, however, is based on the entire Arctic seabed being part of its own continental shelf. The US, meanwhile, notes that it is not a signatory to the treaty, while experts point to the small print of the document, which prevents a country with a vast underwater shelf from keeping the resources to itself, forcing it to share the revenues with developing nations.

Russia’s media stoically ignored the mockery, applauding the expedition as the first salvo in what one newspaper referred to as “the battle for Arctic oil”. The government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta went further, hailing the hoped-for rezoning of the Arctic as “the start of a new distribution of the world”. Washington, however, remained unconvinced. Mr Casey told reporters: “I don’t think whether they went and spray-painted a flag of Russia on those particular ridges is going to make one iota of difference.”

Russia looks to Mediterranean

The head of the Russian Navy says that it should restore a permanent presence in the Mediterranean Sea. “The Mediterranean is a strategically important zone for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet”, Admiral Vladimir Masorin said while visiting its base in the Ukrainian city of Sevastopol. (AP)

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