The Arctic Council should remain a place for Arctic co-operation and stay out of bitter diplomatic and military conflicts going on elsewhere in the world — something many ministers repeated during and after the council’s April 24 ministerial meeting in Iqaluit.

That’s despite signals sent by Leona Aglukkaq, Nunavut MP and outgoing Arctic Council chair, in a media interview prior to the April 24 meeting, when she said she would send a tough message to Russia over its actions in Ukraine.

But in the end, Aglukkaq conveyed that message privately, and not in public, in a meeting with Sergei Donskoi, Russia’s environment minister, before the meeting got underway, “to express our concerns, to state again that we condemn the actions in Ukraine.”

Rob Nicholson, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, also said that he had “expressed Canada’s position” in a private meeting.

“And we make that clear everywhere all the time, and that is that Canada is there to support Ukraine for the long term and we condemn the Russian aggression against Ukraine and that we will continue to support freedom, our sovereignty,” Nicholson said at an Iqaluit news conference after the April 24 meeting.

The Russian embassy in Ottawa replied with a statement accusing Canada of attempting to politicize the Arctic Council.

“We believe the Arctic is a territory of dialogue, not a place for name-calling and reckoning political scores,” the Russian embassy news release stated.

In it, Russia referred to the fighting in eastern Ukraine, now more than a year old, as an “intra-Ukrainian conflict” — an implicit denial of Russian involvement.

The war in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian separatists backed by Moscow and the pro-European government in Kiev has killed more than 6,000 and displaced more than a million people, the United Nations human rights commission said in March.

Two ceasefire agreements reached during peace talks in Minsk, Belarus, have failed to stop the fighting and the European Union, the United States, and other countries, including Canada, continue to maintain a series of economic and diplomatic sanctions against Russia.

But U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, whose country has frequently condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support for pro-Russian separatists, did not talk about Ukraine on April 24.

And he also said the Arctic Council should stay out of military security issues in general.

“Well, we didn’t talk about that today,” Kerry responded. “It is a subject that a number of us have kicked around and talked about individually.

“The tricky thing is whether or not that would complicate what thus far has been an easy process — not easy but nevertheless a very functional process by which we’ve been able to address social, environmental, other kinds of structural issues. And I think to allow that to happen really could deter from the overall work of the council itself, which is why the council has regularly tried to steer clear from it. ”

Kerry said there are other international forums besides the Arctic Council that can do that.

“There are many different ways to approach those challenges without diminishing the capacity of the council to build the kind of consensus that it has built thus far. So I would suggest that for the moment I don’t see that on the agenda. I see addressing those issues on the agenda, but not directly through the council itself at this point in time.”

Military issues have to be addressed at some point, Kerry said, because “there are legitimate concerns.”

Kerry said he has spoken with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who did not attend the Iqaluit meeting.

Kerry said Lavrov “made it crystal clear to me that Russia wants the council to be successful, that they want this to be a co-operative entity that is geared towards peaceful purposes, and that it’s their intent to cooperate with us on the protection of the environment on the agenda that we have set forth.”

The 10,000 respondents from the Arctic Council eight member states who participated in the “Rethinking the Top of the World” survey also said they wanted to see co-operation instead of confrontation.

Despite real concern about security tensions in the Arctic, support for a “firm line” was only endorsed by a minority of respondents in all countries and support for the harder approach has gone down — not up — over the past five years, the pollsters found.