Barents Region

The Barents Region is a name given, by political ambition to establish international cooperation after the fall of the Soviet Union, to the land along the coast of the Barents Sea, from Nordland in Norway to the Kola Peninsula in Russia and beyond all the way to the Ural Mountains and Novaya Zemlya, and south to the Gulf of Bothnia of the Baltic Sea and the great lakes Ladoga and Onega. Among the projects is the Barents Road from Bodø in Norway through Haparanda in Sweden and Finland to Murmansk in Russia. One concrete sign of the increased communication within the region is the establishment in 2006 of an IKEA store in Haparanda, targeting customers 500 km away in Murmansk and northern Norway. The region has six million inhabitants on 1.75 million km, with three quarters of both belonging to Russia.