Faroe Islands Defy Western Sanctions on Russian Fisheries, Fear They're Next After Greenland

• The Faroes maintain bilateral fishing agreements with Russia worth millions annually, breaking ranks with EU and NATO-aligned sanctions
• Greenland's geopolitical crisis has triggered elite anxiety in Tórshavn about small-territory vulnerability in the North Atlantic
• Faroese politicians describe themselves as 'completely, totally helpless' against great-power pressure from Washington, Moscow, and Copenhagen
• The archipelago's economic dependency on Russian fishing access creates a leverage point that any major power could exploit

The Faroe Islands — a self-governing Danish territory of 54,000 people scattered across eighteen volcanic islands in the North Atlantic — continue to cooperate with Russia on fisheries management, maintaining bilateral agreements that most Western nations severed after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The arrangement is worth millions in fishing rights and access to shared stocks. As VG reports, the great-power scramble over neighbouring Greenland has now forced Faroese politicians to reckon with what that dependency actually costs — and what it signals to allies who are watching.

The Faroes are not an EU member. They set their own fisheries policy independently of Copenhagen, and they have used that autonomy to keep the Russian channel open while Denmark, Norway, and the rest of the Western bloc imposed sweeping sanctions. The economic logic is straightforward enough: fishing accounts for over 90 percent of Faroese exports, and the shared stocks in the Norwegian Sea and Barents Sea require bilateral management to prevent collapse. Cut off Russia, and you risk the fish — the only thing keeping the islands economically viable.

But the Greenland crisis changed the calculus. When Washington began openly discussing acquisition of the world's largest island — another autonomous Danish territory, just across the Denmark Strait — Faroese leaders watched a neighbour with ten times their land mass and significant mineral wealth get treated as a piece on someone else's board. The phrase that emerged from Tórshavn's political class, as VG frames it, was blunt: "completely, totally helpless." If Greenland, with its rare earth deposits and American air base at Pituffik, cannot control its own geopolitical fate, what chance does a fishing archipelago have?

The anxiety cuts in multiple directions. Washington wants Nordic alignment against Russia and views any continued cooperation with Moscow as a breach of solidarity. Moscow values the Faroese fishing agreements partly because they represent a crack in the Western front — proof that sanctions are not universal. Copenhagen, meanwhile, retains formal sovereignty over Faroese foreign and defence policy, meaning the islands' room to manoeuvre depends entirely on how much autonomy Denmark chooses to tolerate at any given moment. Three capitals, three sets of interests, and the Faroes lack leverage with any of them.

The deeper problem is structural. Small autonomous territories survive by being useful to larger powers without being important enough to fight over. The North Atlantic is no longer that kind of neighbourhood. The GIUK gap — the naval chokepoint between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK through which Russian submarines must pass to reach the Atlantic — runs directly through Faroese waters. NATO has been quietly reinforcing surveillance and anti-submarine capabilities across the region. The Faroes sit at the geographic centre of a military competition they did not choose and cannot opt out of.

Faroese politicians now face a question that Greenlandic leaders have already been forced to confront: whether the autonomy they enjoy within the Danish realm is real sovereignty or a polite fiction that evaporates the moment a great power decides their location matters more than their preferences. The fishing agreements with Russia provide immediate income. They also provide Moscow with a diplomatic foothold in NATO's backyard — a fact that every other capital in the alliance has noticed.

The Faroes export roughly 500,000 tonnes of fish per year. Their defence consists of a single Danish naval inspection vessel.

Sources: VG