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WILHELM ARCHIPELAGO, Antarctica — Sometimes, in the middle of a long workday or as she’s falling asleep, Anzhelika Hanchuk sees her phone jolted to life by a bright notification that means Kyiv is under attack from Russian missiles.
The meteorologist is about as far as she could be from the Ukrainian capital and the conflict raging in her home country. Surrounded by the jagged glaciers and towering peaks of the Antarctic Peninsula with only a colony of gentoo penguins for neighbors, Hanchuk is leading a group of 14 Ukrainians helping the war effort in an unlikely way: by keeping its Antarctic program afloat.
“Stopping the base for even one year and then trying to restart it is simply impossible,” she said. “To stop the base for a year would mean losing it forever.”
Maintaining a permanent scientific presence at Vernadsky Research Base, the mint-green structure perched on a remote, rocky outcropping nearly 10,000 miles from Kyiv, might seem an unusual priority for a country fighting for its existence at home. But Ukrainian officials see their small polar foothold as not just a scientific endeavor, but also a crucial bulwark in their fight for survival and against Russia’s expansionist plans.
That’s because its very existence secures Ukraine a seat at the table where major world powers govern the vast white landmass entirely by consensus — giving the besieged country an important forum to draw attention to Russian aggression in all its forms. A long-term polar strategy adopted this year by Ukraine declares its Antarctic presence a “platform for protecting national interests.”
“Ukraine’s systematic presence in the regions of Antarctica, the Arctic, and the World Ocean is of major strategic and geopolitical importance,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said when approving the strategy in February. “It provides additional foreign policy instruments, strengthens Ukraine’s national security, enhances our country’s position on the global stage, and contributes to countering Russia’s aggressive policy in these regions.”
On May 11, the core decisionmakers in the continent’s governance will gather in Hiroshima, Japan, for the annual Antarctic Consultative Treaty Meeting. Representatives of 29 nations will debate everything from restrictions on krill fishing in the Southern Ocean to the future of Antarctic tourism to the frontiers of mineral prospecting on the resource-rich continent.
The politics of the war in Ukraine have seeped into the work of the little-known governing body. Lines between the Western countries backing Ukraine on one side and Russia on the other have hardened, with the United States delegation under the Trump administration retreating from its previous support for Ukraine.
“If a state does not comply to the fundamentals of international law and the UN Charter, there is no reason to expect that it will behave differently under the Antarctic Treaty,” said Evgen Dykyi, director of Ukraine’s National Antarctic Scientific Center, whose Kyiv office was struck by a Russian missile in 2022. “In general, we strive to remind all international forums that the Russian Federation’s aggressive, genocidal war against Ukraine and Ukrainians is far from over.”
If Antarctic governance increasingly feels like geopolitics in miniature, Ukraine sees it as a crucial foothold to build alliances and gain leverage in a way they might not be heard elsewhere. And there are now human stakes in the complex diplomacy that governs the largely uninhabited continent — including the arrest and detention of what Ukraine calls the first-ever Antarctic political prisoner.
Ukraine’s role in the Antarctic and the rules that govern the white continent have their roots in Cold War great-power competition. The 12 countries whose scientists had been active there, including the United States and the Soviet Union, joined the Antarctic Treaty in 1959 to chart the region’s future.
Under the agreement inked in Washington that year, Antarctica would “be used for peaceful purposes only” — military activities were expressly prohibited — and would belong to no one. No previous attempts to lay claim to specific swaths of territory on the continent would be recognized, leaving its ice-covered 5.5 million square miles to be governed entirely by consensus.
In the decades that followed, the treaty’s framework expanded to include sub-committees tackling issues like environmental protection, scientific collaboration and the logistics of operating national Antarctic programs. And as other countries began to send their own researchers down to Antarctica, the group of nations with a seat at the table grew, too: There are now 29 members with “consultative status,” meaning a chance to vote on any measures put before the group, and 58 signatories to the treaty overall.
“It’s a brilliant piece of diplomacy, because it balanced all these diverging interests that existed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the context of the Cold War,” said Patrick Flamm, a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt who this year will be part of Germany’s delegation to Hiroshima. “It has shown itself to be quite adaptive, and that’s the only reason why it still exists over 60 years later, and everyone is still engaging in it in more or less good faith.”
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the 12 research stations that the country had built across Antarctica — including one far inland, Vostok, which holds the record for the coldest place on earth — were all assumed to belong to Russia. Ukrainian scientists found themselves iced out.
“We started to have quite a lot of experienced Ukrainian polar specialists who had no place to work because there was no Antarctic station anymore,” said Olena Marushevska, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s Antarctic program.
It was an opportune time for a country looking to establish its own Antarctic foothold. The British Antarctic Survey, which had once operated 19 research stations scattered around the continent, was looking to offload its Faraday Station on Galindez Island, about 750 miles south of Argentina. The Brits placed one main condition on a transfer of the facility: that whoever took over continue the atmospheric surveys Faraday had run since it first opened in 1947, an important documentation of climate change in one of the world’s fastest-warming regions.
In 1996, Ukraine purchased Faraday for a symbolic £1 and renamed it Vernadsky Research Base, after a Ukrainian mineralogist who served as the first president of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences. Eight years later, Ukraine became one of the 17 countries to gain consultative status since the Antarctic Treaty was originally signed.
In the years since, Ukraine has defined itself as a protector of Antarctic wildlife, teaming up with a group of mostly European countries pushing for new swaths of territory to be designated as marine protected areas. Officials launched an Instagram account for the Antarctic program, posting regularly about everything from daily life at Vernadsky to Antarctic wildlife to the history of the program. In the 2010s, the station began offering tours to ships that took a growing number of tourists to Antarctica, bringing as many as 4,000 visitors per year to learn about Ukraine’s Antarctic activities.
And in 2021, Ukraine took another significant step in its Antarctic capabilities when it purchased a polar icebreaker that the United Kingdom was preparing to retire. The ship, renamed the Noosfera, had just crossed the equator on its inaugural journey to Vernadsky when Russia began its full-scale invasion in February 2022. The ship was supposed to dock in southern Chile to pick up scientists and support staff selected for that year’s expedition team. Practically overnight, the airports from which they had planned to depart Ukraine ceased to operate and they scrambled to figure out their next steps.
Hanchuk was packing her bags for her flight to Chile when the war broke out. Born in 1994, Hanchuk grew up in Kyiv on science fiction books and films, but eventually found her curiosities drawn away from the cosmos and towards the earth itself. She studied meteorology, got a job at the national weather forecasting center, and took notice of the distant outpost where Ukraine administered one of Antarctica’s longest-running climate records.
But the prospect of a year working among Vernadsky’s climate and atmospheric scientists felt different amid the new reality of a war at home. Were she and the colleagues selected for that year’s expedition prepared to leave for an entire year to a remote location with limited transport options home — and no guarantees their country would still be there when they returned the following year?
“People at the station started to worry a little bit,” said Marushevska, the Kyiv-based Antarctic program spokesperson. “You know, it is war, maybe nobody will pick us up. Maybe the state will not exist anymore.”
Hanchuk and her colleagues decided to move forward with their expedition, seeing the value of maintaining a year-round presence and the need to relieve colleagues who had already spent a year at the station. They traveled by bus from Ukraine to Poland, where the Polish Antarctic program offered to host them and lend them any supplies they hadn’t been able to bring with them. Ten days after the Russian invasion, they flew from Warsaw to Punta Arenas in Chile to meet the Noosfera.
As the ship neared the end of the 500-mile trip across the rough waters of the Drake Passage, they began to encounter craggy icebergs lit turquoise or azure from below. The mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula emerged ahead, towering above a wall of glacial ice that extended as far as they could see. Once Hanchuk and her 13 colleagues — a mix of meteorologists, geophysicists, biologists and support staff — arrived at Vernadsky, they settled into new daily routines of research and station maintenance, marked with magnets on a whiteboard bearing each staffer’s name and coded with pictures of different penguins.
Remote and isolated in the best of times, those at Vernadsky felt farther away than ever during wartime. (The closest settlement is the United States’ Palmer Station, nearly 40 miles away.) Spotty and unreliable Antarctic internet service sometimes left them cut off from updates about what was happening back home. The world learned about the horrors of Bucha and Mariupol in real time; updates reached Vernadsky in bits and pieces.
“To really maintain the station or the Antarctic Program for a country which is at war … takes more from people than it usually does,” Hanchuk said.
From the outset, countries aligned with Ukraine offered their help. When the war began, and it was unclear whether the country would be able to sustain supply routes to Vernadsky, representatives from the British Antarctic Survey offered to bring food and fuel from their base at Rothera Station a few hundred miles away. Poland canceled its long-standing contract with Russia to transport Polish scientists to their Antarctic base and signed a deal with Ukraine to transport them on the Noosfera instead. The United States was among nearly two-thirds of the consultative members of the Antarctic Treaty who agreed to participate in an informal Friends of Ukraine group on the sidelines of annual Antarctic Treaty meetings.
Ukrainian officials called on fellow consultative members who met in Berlin that spring to suspend Russia’s voting rights at future meetings and halt any joint Antarctic projects or contacts with Russia, saying these were reasonable responses when one consultative member attacks another. The Russian delegation’s reply, justifying the war as a response to alleged Ukrainian aggression, prompted representatives from 25 countries to walk out in protest.
“It’s such a strange situation where one consultative party is basically denying the statehood of another consultative party, and yet they are supposed to participate as equals,” said Yelena Yermakova, a postdoctoral research fellow in political science at Rome’s LIUSS University whose work focuses on polar governance.
Since the 2022 invasion, 32 polar scientists and staffers, known informally as “military penguins,” have joined the Ukrainian army to fight on the front lines; eight have been seriously injured. Yuriy Lyshenko, a diesel electrician who had already taken four trips to Vernadsky and was part of the 2022-23 expedition, had part of his leg amputated after a mine blast injury in 2024 but returned to Antarctica for a fifth time the following year with a prosthesis.
As Ukraine celebrates its 30th anniversary at Vernadsky, the Antarctic program is settling into an unimaginable new wartime normal. Although its primary focus is research, the expedition team has found indirect ways to advance Ukraine’s national-security priorities, building alliances through a form of scientific soft power.
Mexico’s leaders have avoided openly taking sides in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador refusing to impose sanctions on Russia and criticizing U.S. military aid to Ukraine. But in this part of the world, where Mexico lacks its own base, it is an eager partner to Ukraine.
Under a five-year research agreement, Ukraine will host visiting Mexican scientists at Vernadsky for free when they’re working on projects of shared interest, like this year’s geological and microbiological surveys. Scientists from Colombia, which is also officially neutral in the war, worked with Ukrainian scientists on joint oceanography research aboard the Noosfera earlier this year.
In the years since the war began, Ukraine’s scientists have increasingly joined broader cross-border research collaborations on everything from polar infrastructure to ocean ice and work with everyone from the European Union to the United Kingdom to Turkey.
“If you spend a lot of time together, you start to talk about different things, including war, and it's clear that they start to understand us better,” said Marushevska. “And from a neutral position, they begin to have more support for us.”
The Noosfera hasn’t been back to its home port of Odesa since it left in January 2022; between trips to Vernadsky, it docks in South Africa. But it has nonetheless become a useful diplomatic instrument for Ukraine, which has offered other countries its use in an area with severely limited transport options. (It also affords a cash-strapped Ukrainian government some additional income to support the program’s activities when other countries pay them for transport on the vessel.)
“We want to be a partner, not only a victim,” said Marushevska. “It is really important to us to show that we are in a position to provide support as well.”
This year, Hanchuk’s second winter in Antarctica, things are both easier and harder than they were in 2022. Vernadsky’s internet is now fast and reliable thanks to Starlink; expedition members keep the main Ukraine air raid app active on their phones so they know when friends or family back home are in danger.
But there are things they carry with them that other polar researchers don’t. When Hanchuk hears the crack and deep rumble of an avalanche or one of Antarctica’s massive glaciers calving, she can’t help but be transported to the sound of missiles striking over Kyiv.
“Your brain knows it’s an avalanche,” she said, “But your body reacts to another sound.”
The days are still relatively long at Vernadsky, but losing nearly 10 minutes of light each day. Soon, it will be bathed in the near-constant darkness that comes with its location just outside the Antarctic Circle. Outside the door of the station, dozens of gentoo penguins — known by the patch of white around each eye and the bright splash of orange on their beaks — waddle their way across the hills along the Antarctic shoreline that will soon be covered in feet of snow and ice. A
Already, the tourist season has ended and the flow of occasional ships passing by has slowed to almost nothing. The 14 Ukrainians at Vernadsky will be largely on their own until the sea ice begins to open up again in October and November, passing their free time in the station’s library or playing pool in its British-style pub, a holdover from its previous owners. Out front, the large blue-and-yellow signpost covered in arrows to major world capitals, other Antarctic bases and Ukrainian cities — Kyiv, 15,168 kilometers; Kharkiv, 15,375 kilometers; Lviv, 14,840 kilometers — is a reminder of just how far they are from home.
To Hanchuk, these sacrifices are worth it — for the continuity of the scientific research she and the team are conducting and for the position it gives Ukraine in Antarctic governance.
“It gives us the right to have our voice there,” said Hanchuk. “Being at the same table, it means … that our opinion is also important.”
Theoretically, Antarctica is supposed to be a place of science divorced from statecraft. But in reality, “separating out Antarctic governance from geopolitics is very hard,” said Klaus Dodds, a professor of geopolitics who specializes in Antarctic governance at London’s Middlesex University. “Science and geopolitics were and are bedfellows.”
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Antarctic Treaty members had been increasingly been falling into two distinct camps: One that includes EU countries, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and others (and traditionally, the United States) that has pushed for tougher environmental restrictions on the white continent, and another, led by Russia and China, that consistently block those initiatives. In a consensus-based system, that essentially means that little progress has been made in recent years on everything from establishing new protections for emperor penguins (which were officially classified as endangered last month) to placing limits on Antarctic tourism.
Russian behavior elsewhere in the world has emboldened criticism — led by Ukraine, but joined by others — of its activities in the Antarctic, too. Although Russia’s prospecting for oil, gas, and precious metals along the Antarctic coast had been an open secret for years, it wasn’t until the full-scale invasion in 2022 that other countries began openly calling them out for it. (The Antarctic Treaty’s environmental protocol prohibits all forms of resource extraction until at least 2048.)
In 2024, to mark the two-year anniversary of the invasion and the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Biden administration sanctioned the Alexandr Karpinsky, a Russian research vessel belonging to the Russian state-owned holding company Rosgeo, for being “engaged in mineral exploration and prospecting.” (The Russian foreign ministry, contacted through its embassy in Washington, did not respond to a request for comment.)
“It’s quite clear that what the Russian Federation has been doing is prospecting, which is formally, at least, verboten — but nobody wanted to go near that for years and years,” said Alan Hemmings, an Antarctic governance expert at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and a veteran delegation member at the Antarctic Treaty meetings. “It’s only since the Russians have been on the wrong side of history with their invasion of Ukraine that Western countries are prepared to say, ‘Oh no, they shouldn't be doing this.’”
After Donald Trump returned to the White House, however, the United States stopped taking part in the Friends of Ukraine sessions it had once convened. Asked whether the U.S. delegation would participate this year, the State Department declined to answer directly, but did criticize “politicization” of Antarctic Treaty meetings.
“The United States believes international organizations should focus on their core mandates and technical work, free from politicization — such as attempts to inject issues like the Russia-Ukraine war into an Antarctic Treaty meeting — that undermines their effectiveness and the cooperation necessary to address shared challenges,” the department said in an unsigned statement.
The war hardened those alliances further, creating additional gridlock and a trickier atmosphere than the once-collegial environment. When delegations met in India in 2024, Russia put forth Belarus as a candidate to become a consultative member; Ukraine and its allies blocked the request, citing the country’s role in supporting Russia’s war effort. Meanwhile, Canada has also requested to join, but Russia (and China) blocked its membership in retaliation.
“The atmosphere has indeed changed, and for the worse … the meeting is effectively paralyzed,” said Dykyi, the director of Ukraine’s Antarctic program and a longtime delegation member at these meetings.
Given the deadlock, Ukrainian officials headed to Hiroshima next week have given up hope for concrete progress on policy issues. Instead they plan to focus on the plight of Leonid Pshenichnov, a Ukrainian marine biologist who was arrested in Russian-occupied Crimea last fall while gearing up for the annual meeting of the Antarctic Treaty’s marine protection committee. Russian officials accused Pshenichnov, who had been part of Ukraine’s delegation to the committee for the last two decades, of high treason for undermining Russia’s krill fishing operations in the Southern Ocean with his advocacy for more marine protected areas.
Ukraine’s Antarctic program knows the 70-year-old Pshenichnov is still being held in Crimea but doesn’t know when he will be sentenced or what comes next. He has been formally registered with Ukrainian government agencies keeping track of prisoners of war and political prisoners. Ukrainian officials do not expect much progress on Pshenichnov’s case, but calling out Russia to keep the country from advancing its objectives amounts to its own victory.
“If we would not be there, they would have more opportunities to promote their agenda,” said Marushevska. “It would already feel like they’d won.”
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