The Alaskan island on the front lines of the Arctic scramble

Edward Soolook is a 58-year-old man with chipped front teeth and a pencil-thin moustache who lives in the most remote place in America. A self-proclaimed alcoholic who often sleeps in, he reckons he has suffered from PTSD ever since he came home from the war in Iraq. He has a bad back, suffers from recurring nightmares about World War III and keeps an arsenal of rifles hanging in the entrance to his tiny wooden cabin, which he uses to hunt walruses, seals and polar bears.

Edward is also the first line of defence against the Russians. Along with 67 other Inupiat Inuit, he keeps watch over the back door to America from Little Diomede, a desolate Alaskan island that rises out of the mists in the middle of the Bering Strait. Little Diomede is only two and a half miles from Big Diomede, its equally craggy, windswept sister – which is part of Russia. They are so close that during the winter it is possible to walk across the frozen waterway between them in less than half an hour. But nobody from Little Diomede ever does; the Russian soldiers posted on Big Diomede are always watching. They fire flares and rifles, and threaten to unleash attack dogs when people stray across the border.

“We watch them, they watch us,” Edward told me when I visited Little Diomede last September. It was late afternoon by the time he grabbed his binoculars, put on fatigues and tumbled into the cold northern sunlight. Across the water, on Big Diomede, we could see a white observation hut clinging precipitously to the cliffs and an antenna peeping above the ridgeline. Edward regularly sees Russian soldiers, ships and helicopters on manoeuvres there. He sends whatever intelligence he gathers over Facebook Messenger to a military officer in Anchorage. “Keep watch, that’s the mission,” Edward said. “We’re the eyes and ears for the nation.”

Little Diomede, which was sold by the Russians to America along with the rest of Alaska in 1867, has been the American sentinel on the Bering Strait ever since the cold war. Climate change is now giving its residents new reasons to stay alert. Across the Arctic there are vast quantities of energy, minerals and fish that were once considered locked away by ice. As it melts, the region is opening up to sailors, speculators and predatory superpowers. A new Great Game is afoot.

Russia, China and America are all jostling to ensure that they are best placed to take advantage of the newly accessible Arctic. The Russians have redeployed troops to some 50 Soviet-era outposts in the area and built airfields, radar stations and ports to keep watch over their thawing northern frontier. Increasingly, they work with ships and fighters from China, whose financial support has added fuel to Russia’s Arctic ambitions. Meanwhile, America has begun to turn Alaska into a northern fortress, by modernising local military infrastructure and bolstering the Arctic Angels, an infantry and paratrooper division. President Donald Trump speaks – with the same bombast that once ushered Alaska into America – of creating a new Arctic empire that would include Greenland (which is currently an autonomous Danish territory).

But while the world’s superpowers scramble for military advantage and resources in the Arctic, the people who live on Little Diomede feel abandoned. Life there is remote, difficult and increasingly bleak. Many islanders feel that though they have done their duty for America by keeping an eye on the Russians, the government isn’t providing them with the help they need – money, jobs and better links to the mainland – to survive the effects of climate change. Little Diomede’s population, which for generations fed itself with locally caught seals and walruses, has shrunk by more than half in 30 years as worsening weather and thinning ice make hunting dangerous. Those who remain are living in small homes which could collapse at any moment as the permafrost beneath them melts and buckles. Many families have fallen apart under the pressure; alcoholism and domestic violence are not uncommon.

“Nobody don’t care about no Diomede,” muttered Otto Soolook, a bald 53-year-old walrus-ivory carver who had been scrambling to prevent his home from collapsing ever since it buckled two weeks beforehand. (Soolook is one of only a handful of last names in use on this closely knit island, where everyone is related in some way.) Otto’s bare arms drooped by his side as he sat on an upturned bucket, looking resigned. It felt like nature was conspiring against Little Diomede. “Something’s wrong with this place,” he said. “It is possessed. We don’t get walrus and seals like we used to. That is climate change. It all starts right here, it feel like.” Twenty years ago, Otto’s five-man hunting crew would have killed hundreds of each before winter arrived; this year, they have managed just five seals and two walruses. (“That’s nothing. That is just a snack.”) He had seen only one seal swimming outside his home all month.

Otto looked wistfully through his grimy windowpane towards Big Diomede. There were richer hunting grounds there, he told me, just out of reach. The international dateline runs between the islands – another arbitrary border separating them. Big Diomede, he joked, is “tomorrow”. And because he’ll never be able to go there, “tomorrow never comes.” He has to rely on food packages from the mainland to get by.

For centuries, people from Little Diomede used to go back and forth across the Bering Strait to visit the inhabitants of the two villages on Big Diomede. They were all Inupiat, an indigenous group whose communities extend across western and northern Alaska. Those living on the Diomedes considered themselves one people on two islands.

In 1948, as the cold war ramped up, the Soviets suddenly closed the border with America. They arrested two boatloads of men from Little Diomede who had gone to see friends, families and lovers on Big Diomede. The Inupiat of Big Diomede were then deported and dispersed throughout the scattered villages of the nearby Soviet mainland, and the island became a military outpost whose men were tasked with protecting Russia’s far east from the Americans.

Over the next 40 years only sporadic contact took place across this “ice curtain”. Some winters, when the sea was frozen, men would walk from one of the villages on the Siberian mainland and stand at the international dateline to trade cigarettes, sweets and stories with those who had walked from Little Diomede.

Robert Soolook, the mayor and postmaster of Little Diomede, went to Russia in 1989, as part of a perestroika-era project that aimed to strengthen ties between Alaska and eastern Russia. As part of the expedition, he skied and dogsledded across hundreds of miles to reach 16 villages on the Soviet coast. He hoped to identify those who had been deported from Big Diomede. In the first 13 villages, he had no luck, until one day, in the 14th, a man introduced himself as his great-uncle. “I had some emotions there for a while,” Robert said. “The way he treated me was the way I would have wanted to be treated.”

There were a handful of visits back and forth during the 1990s, as Washington’s relations with Moscow normalised; they continued even after Russia invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, which caused America to retaliate with sanctions. Many on Little Diomede keep in touch with their Russian cousins on Facebook. They comment on each others’ posts when someone snags a walrus, and exchange messages about raising children, hunting techniques and traditional songs. But after the full-scale war in Ukraine started in 2022, people lost hope of ever visiting again. “We can’t cross that border over there, and they can’t cross over here again,” said Edward, who had a portrait of a Russian relative hanging on his wall. “The ice curtain is back.”

Even if Trump continues to thaw relations between America and Russia, the Bering Strait is likely to remain a site of geostrategic competition. Ships use this narrow chokepoint to venture towards northern gasfields; it’s also an essential leg of the Northern Sea Route, which the Russians hope could eventually compete with the Suez Canal as one of the world’s most important shipping lanes. There are already three times more ships passing through the strait than there were in 2008. The province of Chukotka in Russia’s far east has seen investments quadruple in recent years as plans for ports and infrastructure projects take shape.

The Russians have been keen to advertise their presence. I was told that from Little Diomede you can see and hear their bombers and fighter jets; their flotillas conduct regular exercises in the Bering and Chukchi Seas. One afternoon, I saw this maritime prowess for myself. Two teenagers led me along the precipitous pathway that led into the mists at the very top of Little Diomede. From there I could see the peaks of Siberia lit up by copper-coloured sunlight. There were three ships, at least two of them tankers, hugging the Russian mainland and heading northwards.

“Everything is gonna come right past us. We’re right on the highway bottleneck where we see everything,” Kevin Ozenna, a 32-year-old father of two boys, told me. “Starting to be a lot more common that we see [Russian] boats now.” Kevin had a sniper rifle hanging on the wall of his home, which he had traded with a visiting US Coast Guard vessel in exchange for a walrus skull. He has considered motoring out and holding up a sign asking if the Russians on Big Diomede wanted to shoot together, though he would probably risk being shot if he did.

Nobody quite knows how many Russians are based on Big Diomede today. (There are online groups for soldiers who have been stationed there, where they annually complain that Russian television has forgotten that they are actually the first Russians to welcome the new year.) It has been years since they caught or detained anyone crossing over from America, but they have tried. Kevin told me that eight or nine years ago three Russians had appeared on Little Diomede and offered him $800 to sail them to Russia. They said Moscow had given them permission to try to swim across the dateline, a feat that had been first performed by an American swimmer during the cold war. Kevin agreed to take them, hanging a Russian flag from his boat. By the time they grounded on the beach of Big Diomede, flares were flying and soldiers and dogs were running down from the ridgeline. Kevin grabbed a rock as a souvenir and steered home with Russian vessels tailing him, even across the border.

Any detente between Russia and America is unlikely to quell the paranoia that pervades Little Diomede. Some islanders, including Kevin’s youngest son, have been learning Russian, in case Russia should ever try to seize it. I was berated one afternoon by a man who overheard me and Edward trying to listen to Russian music over an ancient radio receiver. “Are you here trying to communicate with the Russians?” he asked me. “I will report you to the military and tell them that there is a spy here.”

For the moment the only Russians to have invaded Little Diomede are the guard dogs who have broken free of the base on the far side of Big Diomede and run across the ice. One was shot, I was told – its body was hidden for fear of an international incident.

The hunt for minerals in the Arctic may very well turn some villages into boom towns. But Little Diomede is unlikely to be one of them. It lacks a port and the features that make for a good harbour; it doesn’t have sophisticated communication networks or sufficient land to build additional infrastructure on; drinking water, natural resources, and imported goods are in short supply. It is too remote, too small, and too forgotten.

During my eight days on the island, I was ground down by the isolation and depression I found around me. I was put up in the library of the schoolhouse, where I slept under the watchful eyes of George W. Bush, whose image stared down at me from the cover of a children’s biography. I spent the evenings by myself, cooking ramen (I had been asked to bring my own food, not to impinge on the islanders’ limited supplies). Next door to the kitchen was a gym, where playing kids shrieked into the night. Above their heads hung a mural, showing two hands reaching between Big and Little Diomede. “Friends”, it read, in both Russian and English.

There are some two dozen children on Little Diomede. Most were eager to speak with someone from abroad. Because I am British and have round glasses, some of the older ones teased that I looked like Harry Potter. It went beyond a joke: one evening a boy walked into the kitchen, and after checking that we were alone, asked me whether I really was the famous character. I told him that I was. He stood transfixed. I asked him if he wanted me to cast a spell. “Could you please make my life better?” he asked shyly. He ran off before I could think of something to say.

There used to be a plane carrying food and supplies that would land on the ice during the winter to unload. But it no longer comes. “The ice can’t stay frozen, the current moves it, the wind blows it,” Kevin, the young father, explained. The few visitors that come to the island are asked to bring crates of apples, oranges and eggs; whatever is brought in on the postal helicopter that flies in twice a week from Nome, the largest town in western Alaska, is canned, or so processed that it can survive an apocalypse. (I shared my own helicopter ride with multipacks of Coke, neon-orange crisps and boxes of instant mashed potato.)

The only fresh food that you can get on Diomede is what little can be hunted. In his small wooden house, Kevin, who had been cleaning up his sons’ breakfast, opened his freezer. Inside there were a handful of bags stuffed with seal kidneys and walrus meat, all showing signs of freezer burn. In the doorway there was a freshly killed hawk, strung up to drain the blood before dinner.

“I used to walk miles to the open ocean to hunt,” Kevin said. “But now I can’t. The ice is just too thin.” He grew up hanging out in the back of walrus-skin boats watching the older men hunt. These boats, which were constructed and kept seaworthy with traditional knowledge, have been replaced over the past 20 years by tin vessels – which are cheaper but less safe. “We used to hunt like two, three days, at a time. It is now only half-a-day out there tops,” he said. “With small little skiffs, it is dangerous to be out in the open ocean. There are a few times that I thought that that was that for me.”

I had been told by people elsewhere in Alaska that Little Diomede was the Inupiat village that has best retained its traditions, that I should prepare to see its men out cruising the waves and its women gathering greens and berries on the slopes. But I did not see much of this while I was there. Elders worry that traditions passed down for thousands of years, from tracking polar bears on the ice to carving up walrus and seals, are being lost. Men complained to me that their sons did not want to learn; their sons pointed out that their fathers had never shown them.

“It worries me a lot,” Robert, the poker-faced postmaster-mayor, told me. “I am living in two worlds. In our way of life, culturally, and the Western white man’s way which we have to be in nowadays.” It clearly pained him. It was his 60th birthday, but he did not seem happy as he totted up his accounts behind the counter of the post office. “It is as if you are trying to bring a whole trash bag with you, but as you walk you see that it has a hole. By the time you get back and look inside, you realise this is all you have left. That is what I will have to pass on.”

Josef Burwell is one of several pharmacists who are sent in from the mainland for two-week rotations on the island. As an outsider, he had a more blunt assessment of the island’s problems. “Diomede is unsustainable,” Burwell told me. “It is not only climate change, but also because so many of these ‘hunters’ are not hunting because they are ordering on Amazon or they are playing video games on their computer. The water is undrinkable. The kids, when they turn 18 and graduate, most of them leave.” Many of them end up in larger towns, like Nome or Anchorage.

The problems that Little Diomede faces are systemic. Like other indigenous communities in Alaska, it is self-governing. The islanders can pass their own laws, run their own judicial and law-enforcement systems and raise taxes on their lands and members. But for generations, it was the village elders who guided society – who reminded people of their ties to tradition, and who dispensed justice and moral advice as they saw fit. In recent decades, as they died, the people of Little Diomede began to lose their sense of social coherence. Some told me that newer leaders did not govern as effectively or with the same trust from the locals; others whispered that domestic abuse has proliferated.

Although the island has formally been dry since 1974, it has also not been spared from the blight of alcohol. It is smuggled in, and some villagers have left for the mainland to be closer to booze. Edward, who keeps watch over the Russians, told me that he drank any time he went to Nome. “My grandpa, my dad, my brother, my sister, my uncle, they are all alcoholics,” he said. “It is scary. I don’t get help. I’ll seek it, but what good is it going to do? I am just going to go right back to doing it again, because my faith is not strong. You have to have strong faith to stop.”

Faith can take many different forms on Little Diomede. Climate change was a sign that the biblical end of days was approaching, Jerry Iyapana, a middle-aged resident, told me. He watches Indian and Russian TV, because, in his view, they tell the truth – about Antony Blinken provoking Russia into invading Ukraine and Vladimir Putin only doing what he had to protect the Russian-speakers of Donbas. Although he was clearly a conspiracy theorist, Jerry did not strike me as insane at first; he just seemed like he needed someone to talk to.

Little Diomede could have as little as five years left. The school, run by two young teachers from the Midwest and the Philippines, will close as soon as student numbers fall below 12 (it currently has 21 students, with three set to graduate this year). Once that happens, Little Diomede will probably be done. There is land on the mainland which the islanders have been allocated by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, but a previous proposal to move there was voted down.

“Should have moved a long time ago,” Otto, the ivory carver, told me one evening in his creaking cabin. He wants them to do it now, but it is an uphill battle: “They like being isolated.” (Otto, for his part, told me that he sometimes walked away from the village just so that he did not have to see the same 67 people: “You gotta get away before they drive you nuts. You can’t just sit here and listen to their problems!”) “I know they love this place,” he sighed. “But it’s all going away slowly. It’s all dying out. Soon we won’t have nothing, no more.”

Everyone on Little Diomede believes that it is drifting a few feet closer to Big Diomede each year. It may be the islands’ rebellion against their enforced separation, 77 years ago. “They are trying to repair something,” Otto told me. “These islands are getting closer to each other. That is why we are having rockslides, landslides, permafrost melting.” We sat for a few moments in silence. “Maybe they love each other. They miss each other.” ■

Jacob Judah is an investigative journalist based in London