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Canada’s Arctic is a massive, treacherous, and largely inhospitable place, stretched out over nearly 4 million square kilometres of territory – but with a small population roughly equal to Blackburn in England or Syracuse, New York.

“You can take a map of continental Europe, put it on the Canadian Arctic, and there’s room to spare,” Pierre Leblanc, the former commander of the Canadian Forces Northern Area told the BBC. “And that environment is extremely dangerous.”

Standing at the defence of that massive landmass is an aging string of early warning radars, eight staffed military bases and about 100 full-time Coast Guard personnel covering 162,000km of coast, about 60% of Canada’s total oceanfront.

The Arctic region is the scene of intense geopolitical competition, bordered by Russia and the US on either side of the North Pole – and increasingly attractive to China, which has declared itself a “near Arctic state” and vastly expanded its fleet of naval vessels and icebreakers.

Standing in the middle is Canada, whose population is a small fraction of the larger Arctic players.

Nearly four years after Arctic security was thrust into the headlines following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the defence of Canada’s far north has again been brought to the forefront of public consciousness by Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland, a self-governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark that the White House says is vital to safeguarding the US from would-be enemies abroad.

Canada’s Arctic has not gone unnoticed by the Trump administration, which has reportedly become increasingly concerned by perceived vulnerabilities to US adversaries, and in April signed an executive order underscoring American “commitment to ensuring both freedom of navigation and American domination in the Arctic waterways.”

The Canadian government, for its part, has sought to reassure the US and Nato allies that it is doing its part to protect the region.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Mark Carney said that Canada is working to secure “our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic” through “unprecedented” investments in radar systems, submarines, aircraft and “boots on the ground” in the region.

Col Leblanc, who spent a total of nine years in the Canadian Arctic, said those investments have marked a “major shift” in Arctic security, noting that increases in Canadian defence expenditure – from 2% to 5% of GDP by 2035 – have meant “real action” in terms of additional over-the-horizon radar and aircraft dedicated to the Arctic.

Much of this focus, he added, has been prompted by the Trump administration’s renewed focus on the Arctic and Greenland.

“[That] certainly helps the Canadian government move in the right direction,” Leblanc added.

Still, challenges persist, including limited port facilities and difficulties resupplying far-flung bases that are sometimes thousands of cold, empty miles apart.

While Canada and other US Nato allies have opposed the Trump’s administration bid to “take over” Greenland to protect the Arctic, several experts who spoke to the BBC agreed with the administration’s broad assessment that additional defences in the region are urgently needed.

Troy Bouffard, the director of the Fairbanks, Alaska-based Center for Arctic Security and Resilience, said that while on-the-ground cooperation between the US and Canada in the Arctic “remains the envy of the world”, much of the existing defence infrastructure was designed to combat Cold War-era threats, rather than existing ones.

In particular, he warned of the prospect of hypersonic missiles that travel at least five times the speed of sound, making them much harder to detect and intercept than traditional ballistic missiles, which would follow predictable arcs over the North Pole.

Such a threat is no longer theoretical.

Russia has used hypersonic missiles in combat in Ukraine, including a January strike that saw the first operational use of the nuclear-capable “Oreshnik” missile that carries multiple warheads at approximately 10 times the speed of sound.

“That technology has changed everything for us. We have to relook at the entire North American defence system and re-do it,” he said. “What exists right now cannot defend against hypersonic cruise missiles, at all. Like 0%.”

Traditional ground-based radar systems, he added, “are not going to work” against these emerging technologies. Space-based satellites must also contend with coverage gaps in high latitudes, prompting a renewed focus and investments in over-the-horizon radar.

Notably, over-the-horizon technology – along with space-based sensors – form a key part of the Trump administration’s planned Golden Dome missile defence system for North America.

For now, it is unclear what role Canada will play in the Golden Dome, a project Trump said at Davos Canada should “be thankful for”.

On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that Canada was opposed to having the Golden Dome over Greenland “even though The Golden Dome would protect Canada. Instead, they voted in favor of doing business with China, who will ‘eat them up’ within the first year!”.

The BBC has contacted Carney’s office for comment.

Those negotiations have been strained by the often antagonistic relationship between the US and Canada, with Trump in May posting that Canada could pay $61bn to join the programme or become the 51st US state and join for free.

Trump’s remarks prompted Canada’s ambassador to the UN, Bob Rae, to compare it to a “protection racket”.

Despite tensions, Michael Byers, an expert in Arctic security at the University of British Columbia, said that American concerns over Arctic security, and their threats of tariffs, have helped prompt Canada’s government to re-focus on the Arctic.

“Whether or not American concerns are justified, there is a feeling in Ottawa that we have to satisfy [them],” he said. “No one takes the 51st state issue seriously, but what we do take seriously are the economic pressures that the US is able to impose.”

“The Canadian government is very aware of that possibility,” he added.

High level tensions between Ottawa and Washington, however, have yet to turn into tensions on-the-ground in the Arctic – with those there expressing confidence that the US and Canada are cooperating for the time being.

“That’s the business of politicians,” Bouffard said. “It has complicated things, but the practitioners are still going to work together until they’re not allowed to. Everyone’s going to have to rise above the rhetoric.”

Ukraine is now living through its most difficult winter in recent memory.

With January temperatures plummeting below -15C, Russia has been attacking energy infrastructure, leaving about a million Ukrainians without heating.

The capital, Kyiv, is the main target of such attacks. Following the latest Russian bombardment overnight into 24 January, almost 6,000 apartment blocks were left without heating, according to mayor Vitaly Klitschko.

This is the third such Russian attack targeting Kyiv’s heating infrastructure in little more than two weeks, after strikes on 9 and 20 January also left hundreds of thousands freezing in their flats.

“Living in Kyiv is a bit of a gamble these days,” one resident of the Ukrainian capital, Rita, told the BBC.

“If you have heating and gas, there is no electricity and water. If you have electricity and water, there is no heating.

“Coming home is like playing a guessing game every day – will I be able to shower or have hot tea, or neither? And of course missiles and drones come on top of all that.”

She says she has to go to bed wearing a hat and several layers of clothing.

What is making things much worse for Ukraine and easier for Russia is the widespread prevalence of apartment blocks that rely on communal central heating – where water is heated up elsewhere and then pumped into their radiators.

Heating plants in Ukraine are huge and many thousands of people are affected when they are targeted by Russian forces. Ukraine says that all such power plants have now been hit.

Such attacks also disrupt electricity supplies, but while a generator or battery pack might help in this situation, heating is less straightforward – especially when there is also no electricity to power your heater.

Kyivteploenergo, the monopoly supplying heating and hot water in the Ukrainian capital, told the BBC “the absolute majority” of houses in Kyiv rely on its services. It said it could not share the exact number for security reasons.

In Zaporizhzhia, a frontline city home to 750,000 people, almost three-quarters of residents rely on central heating, according to Maksym Rohalsky, the head of the local association of apartment block dwellers.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022, about 11 million households in Ukraine relied on central heating, compared to seven million autonomously heated households, Ukrainian energy expert Yuriy Korolchuk said.

Cities across the Soviet Union, including in Ukraine, were the focus of huge construction programmes launched in the 1950s to mass produce cheap housing.

The landscapes of cities in the former USSR are dominated by ubiquitous nine-storey residential buildings made from pre-fabricated concrete panels, known as “panelki”, or smaller five-storey blocks of flats known as “khrushchevki”, after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who oversaw their construction in the 1950s and 1960s.

Heating to such houses is supplied by large plants known as TETs – an acronym that stands for “heat and electricity centrals” in Ukrainian as they generate electricity as well as heat.

Detached houses occupied by a single family, known as “private houses” in Ukraine, are normally found in rural areas and are rare in cities.

“Ukraine inherited the Soviet heating system and it hasn’t changed anything, it stays predominantly centralised,” Korolchuk told the BBC.

“These heating plants were not designed to be attacked with missiles or drones, that’s why these vulnerabilities came to the fore during the war.”

According to him, this is a new tactic used by Russia.

“During the previous winters, there were no such strikes against the heating system. They happened only occasionally, and they didn’t directly target heating plants,” he added.

Referring to ongoing talks to end the war, he says “the factor of negotiations is now possibly playing a role, it’s a form of pressure”.

Large centralised installations bring about efficiencies of scale, but should they be targeted by bombs or drones, the consequences can be devastating for hundreds of thousands of people.

The Ukrainian government is acutely aware of this vulnerability, and is planning to reduce it by making individual heating points mandatory at apartment blocks.

However, undoing decades of Soviet urban planning will not be quick or easy.

Bloomberg via Getty Images