Inside a Russian military base above the Arctic Circle

The Northern Clover military base on Kotelny Island is one of Russia’s newest military outposts, in one of the most forbidding environments on the planet. The trefoil-shaped complex — painted in the scheme of the Russian tricolor — is built to house up to 250 servicemen, and has enough supplies for them to survive and operate for over a year, with no help from the outside world.

Situated in a vast landscape of blinding white above the Arctic Circle, the Kotelny base is closer to Alaska than to Moscow. It is one of three new Russian bases above the 75th parallel, part of a larger push by Russian President Vladimir Putin to flex his country’s military muscle across its massive Arctic coastline. The Russian military says it has built 475 military sites in the past six years, spanning from the country’s western frontier with NATO borders to the Bering Strait in the east.