Trump announces project for 11 icebreakers with Finland

The United States plans to purchase 11 icebreakers from Finland, with construction to occur in both countries, President Donald Trump announced Thursday at the White House alongside Finnish counterpart Alexander Stubb.

"We have a big order coming up. We're buying icebreakers," Trump said in the Oval Office.

The president said that under the agreement, four of the ships would be built in Finland while seven would be built in the United States, helping to bolster US shipbuilding jobs and expertise.

"What you're doing is, you're going to be teaching us about the icebreaker business," Trump told Stubb in the Oval Office.

"We're buying the finest icebreakers in the world and Finland is known for making them," he said, without specifying a dollar figure for the purchases.

Earlier, Stubb had announced on X that he would be signing a memorandum of understanding with Trump, which would "lay the foundation for commercial agreements between the US Coast Guard and Finnish companies."

The US Coast Guard in August commissioned its first new icebreaker in a quarter century, a retrofitted oil industry support vessel, saying at the time that the Arctic was a "zone of strategic global competition."

Russia has in recent years beefed up its military presence in the Arctic region by reopening and modernizing several bases and airfields abandoned since the end of the Soviet era, while China has poured money into polar exploration and research.

The rapid melting of polar ice has sent activity in the inhospitable region into overdrive as nations eye newly viable oil, gas deposits, mineral deposits and shipping routes in an area with a complex web of competing territorial claims.

Last year, under the administration of president Joe Biden, the United States committed to working together with Canada and Finland on icebreaker construction, though no contracts were announced.