State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said in a statement that “Washington’s desire to seize Russian resources abroad will prompt us to remind him that Russia has something that America needs to give back, like Alaska.”

For his part, State Duma deputy from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Nikolai Kolomtsev indicated that “the deputies began discussing the protocol instructions on the denunciation of the agreement with Norway on the delimitation of maritime spaces and cooperation in the Barents Sea,” adding: “Only yesterday we discussed the need for something, Norway has already begun let containers of goods pass through our territory, imagine if we also gave an order, you see America will start delivering fish to where it should be.

Norwegian authorities have previously announced that they have agreed to let goods through their territory to the Russian cities of Svalbard, after refusing at the end of June last year to pass goods through the only checkpoint on the Russian-Norwegian border.