Orlov’s export business was unharmed by the sanctions, which excluded food products, and Putin’s counter-measures led to a spike in domestic sales for Norebo-caught capelin, mackerel and herring.

“This showed that there was interest for Russian fish here,” Orlov said in a February 2016 interview to Kommersant, a Russian business daily. “And in the end it turned out that it is not worse than the Norwegian fish. Now they are getting used to our Pacific herring.”

Norebo’s business is further buttressed by a surging market for fish as consumers seek to add healthy protein to their diets, according to research from the United Nations, while the Norwegian Seafood Council reports that the price of cod specifically has risen by about 13 percent since 2013.

Ocean Trawlers

Orlov graduated from an engineering marine school in Murmansk with a navigator’s degree and a fluency in English in 1991, months before the Soviet Union and its command economy finally buckled, unleashing a free-market frenzy on an unprepared public.

More than 150,000 people -- a third of the city’s population -- left in search of better opportunities, with many relocating to St. Petersburg and Moscow. Orlov left at first too, heading west to Norway before being drawn back home by the Barents Sea, the body of water at the south end of the Arctic Ocean that Russians once called the Murman.

He was hired in 1993 by Magnus Roth, a former Swedish naval officer, to work for a Norwegian company selling cheap Russian fish across Scandinavia. Four years later, they started their own business in Norway called Ocean Trawlers, leasing Norwegian ships to Russian fishermen who were struggling with outdated Soviet-era boats. They managed the business in tandem, Roth explained in a 2011 interview with Norsk Fiskerinaering magazine. Roth managed sales and helped arrange loans from Western banks while Orlov ran the Russia operation.

Fresh Eyes

They were joined in 1998 by an acquaintance of Orlov’s, Alexander Tugushev, who graduated from the same Murmansk engineering school and became deputy head of the government body that oversaw the fishing industry.

“Magnus opened our eyes to how foreigners run the fishing business,” Tugushev, who worked as one of Ocean Trawler’s early barter partners, said in a separate November interview. “We were obsessed with the idea of creating the world’s largest fishing company.”