Always closed to media and the public, and held in a different country each year, this tightly guarded session was convened by 29 states in Helsinki, Finland, over May and June 2023. Countries like Australia, China, the US, South Africa and Russia discussed the 1959 treaty’s usual objectives .
As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visits South Africa, a chorus of local and international campaigners have vowed to protest against the planned Cape Town arrival of the Kremlin’s Antarctic seismic ship, the Akademik Alexander Karpinsky. Despite a mining ban, the ship has built vast oil.