MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Russian Natural Resources and Environment Minister Sergei Donskoi suggested to Russian President Vladimir Putin last week that Russian-Danish bilateral talks would facilitate their bids for larger shares of the Arctic continental shelf filed to the United Nations.
"It might be too soon to say that we can do this in a bilateral environment. We don’t know about Canada. They can say: ‘Hey, you are dividing our part of the world’," Jensen told the Financial Times newspaper in an interview, adding that Denmark would stick to the international rules.
Russia is claiming an area of 1.2 million square kilometers (500,000 square miles) in the Arctic with as much as 5 billion tonnes of hydrocarbon reserves, according to the expert estimates. Russia's claims overlap those filed by Denmark in 2014 by some 550,000 square kilometers (212 square miles).