The Russian Arctic islands span roughly 7,000 kilometers from Karelia in the west to the Chukchi Peninsula in the east — a distance roughly equal to the width of the continental United States. The islands lie within the marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean: the Barents Sea, the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea, the East Siberian Sea, the Chukchi Sea, and the Bering Sea. They are not a single archipelago but a collection of geographically distinct island groups, each with its own character, geology, and history. The largest single island in the group is Severny Island, part of Novaya Zemlya, which covers about 48,904 square kilometers — Russia's second largest island overall and the fourth largest in Europe. Together, the major island groups cover hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land above the Arctic Circle.

Franz Josef Land, in the Barents Sea north of Novaya Zemlya, is a mosaic of roughly 190 glaciated islands covering about 16,134 square kilometers. Its ice caps and black volcanic outcrops make it one of the most otherworldly landscapes on Earth, and it was a major destination for late nineteenth-century polar expeditions. Severnaya Zemlya — Soviet-era Soviet ideological naming produced islands called October Revolution Island, Bolshevik Island, and Komsomolets Island — was the last major land mass on Earth to be discovered, explored only in the early twentieth century. The New Siberian Islands, in the Laptev and East Siberian Seas, are famous for permafrost exposures that contain mammoth remains in such numbers that they were once commercially mined for ivory. Wrangel Island, in the Chukchi Sea near Alaska, hosts one of the world's densest populations of polar bear maternal dens and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Russia's formal claim to these islands emerged from a century of competitive Arctic exploration. The note of September 20, 1916 specifically named the islands it covered: Henrietta, Jeannette, Bennett, Herald, Edinenie, New Siberia, Wrangel, Novaya Zemlya, Kolguev, Vaigach, and others. The Soviet reaffirmation of April 15, 1926 extended the principle of sector sovereignty — any land within the sector of longitude between Russia's eastern and western Arctic extremes belonged to the Soviet state. This legal framework, not universally accepted by international law, established the political boundaries of Russia's Arctic island claims through the Cold War and into the present. Many of the islands remain closed to visitors without special permits.

The Cold War transformed several of these islands into instruments of geopolitical power. Novaya Zemlya became the Soviet Union's primary northern nuclear test site, where the Tsar Bomba — the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated — was exploded in 1961. Franz Josef Land hosted Soviet polar stations and weather monitoring facilities. The islands of the Kara Sea served as waypoints and staging areas for the Northern Sea Route, the strategic shipping corridor along Russia's Arctic coast that connects Europe to Asia without passing through any foreign straits. Today, as Arctic sea ice retreats and shipping through the Northern Sea Route becomes commercially viable, the Russian Arctic islands have regained strategic importance — as potential military bases, resource extraction zones, and navigational landmarks for an ocean that is, very slowly, opening.

Beyond their human histories, the Russian Arctic islands support ecosystems of remarkable resilience. Polar bears, walrus, bearded seals, and Arctic foxes inhabit these coasts; the surrounding seas teem with beluga whales and narwhals in summer. The bird cliffs of Franz Josef Land host hundreds of thousands of nesting seabirds. Wrangel Island's combination of relatively mild (by Arctic standards) climate and geographic isolation made it a late refuge for woolly mammoths — the island's dwarf mammoth population survived until approximately 4,000 years ago, long after the mainland populations had gone extinct. That same isolation now makes it one of the most important polar bear breeding sites on Earth. The islands exist in a tension between their roles as military and industrial assets on one hand, and as some of the least disturbed wildlife habitat remaining on the planet on the other.