IQALUIT, Nunavut — A Russian deputy prime minister, Dmitri O. Rogozin, who is blacklisted from traveling to most of Europe provoked a diplomatic scuffle last weekend when he passed through Norway on his way to the North Pole.
Mr. Rogozin, part of a delegation that included priests bearing holy water and a banner of Jesus Christ, was at the top of the world to open a scientific research station on a shrinking ice cap and to proclaim, rather showily, Russia’s interest in the region.
“The Arctic,” he boasted on Twitter, “is a Russian Mecca.”
Mr. Rogozin’s excursion came only days before a biennial summit meeting of the Arctic Council, an international organization created to foster cooperation in the region, that began on Friday on Baffin Island, in the far north of Canada.
The council’s mission is now being strained by the broader deterioration of relations with Russia over its intervention in Ukraine. Russia’s actions have resulted in sanctions and travel bans on dozens of officials, like Mr. Rogozin, and a prohibition on the sale of American technology and services to help Russia tap its potentially enormous energy resources in the Arctic.
President Vladimir V. Putin has responded by stepping up air patrols along Russia’s border with NATO nations, including those that are members of the Arctic Council, in a cycle of confrontations reminiscent of the Cold War.
He has also begun to build up troops and bases in response to increased commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route and a 2013 protest by Greenpeace International against Russia’s first oil platform in the waters off its northern coast.
“There is a pushing of the envelope here,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who is to attend the meeting on Friday as part of an American delegation led by Secretary of State John Kerry.
“The Arctic should be this zone of peace,” Ms. Murkowski said during a recent speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, alluding to the Arctic Council’s founding purpose. “I absolutely believe that, adhere to it, but I also recognize that within a zone of peace, there is respect that you show for one another.”
Russia’s military activity in the Arctic and its vast territorial claim to waters there highlight the strategic priority that Mr. Putin has given to the region as a changing climate has opened it to intense competition over its natural resources.
The Arctic Council — made up of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States, as well as observer nations and organizations — was created in 1996 as a diplomatic forum to address issues that arose from that economic and political competition.
The council was never intended to be a forum for debating military and security matters, and until recently, it appeared to be immune to broader political differences.
At the council’s meeting in Nuuk, Greenland, in 2011, the members adopted its first legally binding agreement to coordinate search-and-rescue operations over 13 million square miles of ocean.
In 2013, in Kiruna, Sweden, the council signed a similar agreement to coordinate cleanup efforts in the event of an oil spill, something that is no longer a hypothetical possibility given Russia’s first shipment of oil from its offshore platform in the Kara Sea last April.
Canada, the host of this year’s meeting, has imposed sanctions on Russian officials over the Ukraine crisis and criticized Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014. After the meeting, the United States will take over the chairmanship of the council, allowing the Obama administration to set its agenda for the next two years.
The State Department’s first senior representative for the Arctic, Robert J. Papp Jr., a retired admiral and former commandant of the Coast Guard, announced that the American agenda would be focused on ocean safety and security, economic development, and President Obama’s policies to address climate change. He and other officials have said they do not expect tensions with Russia to undermine those goals.
The administration’s agenda, however, is already facing international and domestic challenges, including conflicting demands from environmental groups, which want new restrictions on oil exploration, and officials like Ms. Murkowski, who want to promote economic development in Alaska by allowing more drilling.
On Thursday, Mr. Kerry spoke with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, but the Arctic Council’s meeting was only one part of the conversation, which was dominated by the Obama administration’s accusation that Russia is building up forces in and near Ukraine.
Mr. Lavrov, who attended the last council meeting two years ago, declined to go this time. He cited a scheduling conflict, but many suspected that his decision was in retaliation for Canada’s boycott of a meeting on Arctic issues in Russia. Instead, Russia is sending its minister of natural resources and the environment, Sergei Y. Donskoi, who was also on Mr. Rogozin’s trip to the North Pole last weekend.
The growing tensions have raised concern among those who advocate cooperation in the Arctic. A group of 45 officials, experts and others who have been meeting regularly to make recommendations for the American chairmanship called on the United States and other nations to avoid allowing tensions over Ukraine to stall progress on efforts to address the political, economic and social issues in the region.
One of the organizers of that effort, James F. Collins, a former ambassador to Russia who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that the entire coast of Greenland, for example, had just one hospital with four beds, which would be overwhelmed in the event of a disaster at sea.
If the Arctic “becomes another marginal battlefront over Ukraine,” Mr. Collins said, “nobody is going to win.”
On its way to the North Pole and back last weekend, the Russian delegation passed through the Svalbard archipelago, Norwegian territory about 500 miles north of the mainland that, under a 1920 treaty, grants commercial and residential rights to other countries, including Russia.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry rebuffed Norway’s official protest, saying that Mr. Rogozin had every right to travel through the territory.
“It would have been reasonable to expect the Norwegian side to react with understanding in the spirit of Arctic partnership,” the ministry said in a statement, “which Norway has, until now, always displayed.”
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