I started to document Vladimir Putin’s undersea threat to communication and power cables a few blogs ago, but I had no idea of the extent of that cable system. The pictures above give you some idea and, also, illustrate the vulnerability of the world’s cable systems; the latest Russian actions of cutting cables in the Baltic appear to be only the beginning of Putin’s plan to surreptitiously prepare for a war with Europe.
Around 600 undersea cables carry electricity and information across vast oceans and seas. Often, coming ashore at discreet, secret locations: They comprise 870,000 miles (1.4million kilometers). The majority are data cables, responsible for almost all internet traffic.
Analysts say there is always the possibility of accidental damage or human error, but the recent frequency of breakage incidents indicates a far more nefarious trend.
It hardly needs saying, but relations right now between Russia and most of Western Europe are close to rock bottom. They have been strained for years, after events including the Kremlin-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine and Russia’s occupation and annexation of Crimea in 2014. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine only exacerbated that situation.
Nato believes Russia is also waging another war, an undeclared one, something called “hybrid warfare” and that the target is Western Europe itself, with the aim of punishing or deterring Western nations from continuing their military support for Ukraine. It is also very possible that Putin is, at the same time, laying the groundwork for a full-scale war with Europe.
Hybrid warfare, also called “grey zone” or “sub-threshold” warfare, is when a hostile state carries out an anonymous, deniable attack, usually in highly suspicious circumstances. Those attacks are enough to harm their opponent, especially their infrastructure assets, but stop short of being an attributable act of war. It can also mean pre-locating sabotage units that would be activated when a war begins. Undersea transmission cables are an obvious target for such activities.
“In a conflict with Nato, damage to infrastructure at sea along with the targeting of infrastructure ashore would be a key part of Russia’s overall war effort” says Dr Sidharth Kaushal, senior research fellow in sea power at the Whitehall-based Royal United Services Institute.
In recent months the Baltic Sea has become a flashpoint for suspected subsea infrastructure sabotage. In November, Germany said it suspected sabotage after two fiber-optic cables running under the Baltic from Germany to Finland and Sweden to Lithuania were severed. A month later, the Finnish Coastguard seized a tanker carrying Russian gasoline that allegedly cut an undersea power connector between Finland and Estonia. Another example of suspected hybrid warfare attacks are a series of fires amongst the in-transit packages fires of courier companies in the UK, Germany and Poland last year. Polish prosecutors said the incidents were dry runs aimed at sabotaging flights to the U.S. and Canada.
Russia denies being behind these acts of sabotage but is suspected of being behind other attacks on warehouses and railway networks in EU member states, including in Sweden and the Czech Republic. These events are leading some Western governments to conclude there is a good possibility that Russia’s military intelligence agency may have embarked on a systematic campaign of anonymous, covert attacks on Europe in general.
The threat has been taken seriously enough that, in 2017, Nato and the EU set up the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, based in Helsinki.
In November, U.K. Defence Secretary John Healey accused the Russian surveillance ship, the Yantar, of “loitering over UK critical undersea infrastructure”.
Ultimately, potential sabotage to cables should be seen “as not just an isolated phenomenon” but as part of “Russia’s much more holistic programme of targeting communications infrastructure and critical infrastructure overall”, according to Keir Giles, Russia expert at Chatham House and author of “Who Will Defend Europe?” Russia’s focus on subsea cables and telecoms is “part of their programme of ensuring information superiority – which can also mean information interdiction”. This is because if they want to cut off communities in a particular part of the world from information, other than what they are receiving from Russia, “that is seen as a very important objective because of how important it was in the seizure of Crimea”.
That comment makes the Russian tactics even more insidious and scary.
This year Britain’s Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, which scrutinises the structures for government decision-making on national security, launched an inquiry into how vulnerable the U.K. is to undersea cable attacks. “The Russians” says the author and expert on Russia, Edward Lucas, “have probably already planted their underwater drones on the seabed, waiting for orders which may or may not come, to carry out an attack on cables and pipelines. Their surveillance ship, the Yantar, has been doing God-knows-what on the seabed for years”.
THE WHOLE GLOBAL NETWORK OF UNDERSEA CABLES AND PIPELINES, ADDS LUCAS, WAS BUILT ON A NAÏVE BASIS OF TRUST. “WE NEVER THOUGHT IT WOULD BECOME A TARGET OF A HOSTILE STATE BUT NOW WE ARE REAPING THE HARVEST OF DECADES OF COMPLACENCY. OUR ONLY HOPE IS DETERRENCE: SHOWING THE RUSSIANS THAT THE COST TO THEM OF HARMING OUR SUBSEA INFRASTRUCTURE WOULD BE TOO PAINFUL FOR THEM.” How the West handles the threat of sabotage of undersea cables is just one of the many fronts on which it is attempting to deal with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Unfortunately, dictator-wanabee and buddy of Putin, Donald Trump, is adding his own
