As Russia is accused of waging a hybrid war against the West, vital undersea cables show their vulnerability

London- More than 95% of the world’s Internet traffic and voice and communications data flows through a vast network of fiber optic cables strung along the bottoms of oceans and seas. Cables are faster, more reliable and cheaper carriers of data than alternatives such as satellites, and have become indispensable for modern life.

They are the veins and arteries that link our deeply interconnected world, transmitting data for everything from sensitive government and military information and text messages between friends, to trillions of dollars in financial transactions each day, underpinning the global economy.

But our dependence on these undersea cables is a vulnerability that rogue actors, including some US adversaries, have reportedly already attempted to exploit.

Russia has recently been accused by the United States’ NATO allies of Growing “hybrid war” against Europeand analysts say it has shown clear interest in targeting things like undersea infrastructure.

“That’s a pretty explicit part of Russian thinking regarding modern warfare,” Sidharth Kaushal, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British military think tank, said in an interview with News themezone earlier this year.

He said that sabotaging “the critical nodes at which society functions… [has been] illustrated in real time in recent years.”

Since President Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has periodically carried out military attacks against Ukrainian transportation and energy facilities. But beyond the battlefield, Russia has also been accused of attacking infrastructure (including undersea cables) that is vital to other countries, including many of the United States’ NATO allies.

“Sabotage events are a new phenomenon,” Gabrielius Landsbergis, former Lithuanian foreign minister, told News themezone. “They are directly associated with this latest stage of Russia’s militarization and aggressive action, not only against Ukraine, but also against the West.”

Russia has denied accusations of interfering with undersea cables and called accusations that it has carried out acts of sabotage in Europe “Russophobia.”

What is happening in the Baltic Sea?

The Baltic Sea is a nearly closed body of water surrounded by eight NATO countries and Russia.

Relatively few undersea cables connect some of NATO’s Baltic members, such as Lithuania, to the rest of Europe and the rest of the world.

“The Baltic States are not, you know, entirely an island, but they are very much an island,” Landsbergis told News themezone. “That means that for us [Baltic states] connecting to Western infrastructure is quite a difficult task. “So most of our connections, a large part of our connections, go through the Baltic Sea.”

The Baltic Sea is relatively shallow, meaning ships only need to drag their anchors along the bottom to cause potentially serious damage to cables. That increases the possibility of accidental damage, but also gives plausible deniability to malicious actors who might want to carry out sabotage operations there.

and that of Russia “shadow fleet” of ships, with confusing registration and insurance documentation that allows it to continue transporting oil and other energy products around the world despite Western sanctions imposed for its large-scale invasion of Ukraine, has increased its plausible deniability.

When Finland and Sweden joined NATOmany in the West hoped that the Baltic Sea would effectively become a “NATO lake.” In recent years there have been several incidents of alleged Russian sabotage of underwater cables at sea.

“It’s clearly an increase,” Landsbergis told News themezone. “We’ve never seen almost any incidents for the last, I don’t know, 20 years, and suddenly, after [Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine] started, they are basically recurring every month.

Targeting the “anthropogenic shell of modern society”

RUSI’s Kaushal said the apparent sabotage operations in the Baltic are an example of the hybrid warfare tactics being increasingly adopted by American adversaries.

“Since the ’90s and early ’00s, Russians have talked about how the so-called anthropogenic shell of modern society – basically the fragile infrastructure on which it depends – is its Achilles heel,” he told News themezone earlier this year. “Attacks on undersea cables are an important part of this, along with missile attacks (such as on infrastructure in Ukraine) and cyber attacks“.

Landsbergis told News themezone that he believes Russia’s goal in disrupting the undersea cables is to intimidate local populations, as well as “test reactions; you know, how do politicians react? How do the military react? Whether there’s a response or not.”

With the The Trump administration pushes hard For its European NATO allies to become less dependent on the United States for their security, “it’s not a question of how we see NATO, but how Putin sees it,” Landsbergis told News themezone.

He said that without a firm, unified response to sabotage, Putin could determine that “NATO is not the alliance it was before Trump,” and that could lead the Russian autocrat to “say, okay, maybe this is the time I intend to test it.”

What is NATO doing about it?

Earlier this year, NATO launched “Baltic Sentry,” a new operation “to strengthen the protection of critical infrastructure.”

“Working together with all allies, we will do whatever is necessary to ensure the security not only of our critical infrastructure but of everything we hold dear,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in a statement announcing Baltic Sentry in January.

The operation involves maritime patrols, naval aircraft and drones, as well as national surveillance assets, according to NATO. The Alliance said it would also work with industry to improve the resilience of undersea cables.

Sweden, another country that shares the Baltic coast with Russia, broke with its centuries-old policy of military non-alignment and became the newest member of NATO last year, in direct response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Earlier this month it organized military exercises to practice combating covert espionage and sabotage missions carried out by adversaries in the Baltic Sea.

“We are not at peace, but we are not at war either,” Swedish submarine flotilla commander Paula Wallenburg told News themezone during the exercise.

Wallenburg said current circumstances appear “pretty close” to those seen during the Cold War, when the nuclear-armed United States and the then-Soviet Union tested each other’s resolve in a showdown that never escalated into a full-scale military conflict.

“It’s a very serious situation as far as security is concerned here in this area,” he said.

Below are some recent incidents in the Baltic Sea in which Russian-linked vessels were allegedly involved in damaging or seen loitering around undersea cables.

Case study: Águila S

On Christmas Day 2024, one power cable and four telecommunications cables linking Finland and Estonia suffered unplanned outages, reducing the interconnectivity of the two countries. The Finnish National Bureau of Investigation later discovered a 60-mile drag mark near the Estlink 2 cable.

The Eagle S, a crude oil tanker sailing under the Cook Islands flag and officially registered to a United Arab Emirates company, left the Russian Baltic port of Ust-Luga on the morning of the outages, with its destination listed as Turkey, according to MarineTraffic ship tracking data.

He The ship sailed on one of the Estlink submarine cables. in the Gulf of Finland at the time when the country’s power grid operators reported a power outage.

The ship’s anchor was later discovered near the point where the trawl mark ended.

Finnish border guards detained the ship and its crew, headed by a Georgian citizen.

The Eagle S was released into international waters in March, but Finland brought criminal charges against the crew. The case was dismissed in October, when the court ruled that prosecutors had not proven intent, but said they would appeal.

Case study: Two Russian trawlers tracked in area when Svalbard cable was cut

In February 2022, Norwegian police told local media they believed “human impact” was to blame for damage to one of a pair of undersea telecommunications cables connecting the country’s mainland to the northern archipelago of Svalbard a month earlier.

Space Norway, which operates the Svalbard submarine cable system, told News themezone that the two cables, which were placed as a redundant pair in case one was damaged, are the northernmost submarine cable systems in the world.

Space Norway said it detected an outage in the Greenland Sea on January 7.

The damage occurred in an area where cables descend steeply from a depth of 980 feet to nearly 9,000 feet, the operator told News themezone.

Generally, the cables are buried approximately six feet deep, although there may be variations due to the nature of the seabed, the state explained, although it declined to go into details about the conditions of the seabed where the damaged cables were buried.

There was never a loss of service to users in Svalbard, a Space Norway spokesperson said, and the investigation into the outage was ultimately closed due to lack of evidence.

But a report by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK and open source information showed that Russian fishing trawlers made more than a dozen passes over the area before the damage occurred.

Other evidence of “hybrid warfare”

This week, Poland’s top diplomat accused Russia of carrying out an “act of state terrorism” blowing up a railroad track over the weekend.

“It was not only an act of subversion, as happened before, but also an act of state terrorism, since its clear intention was to cause human casualties,” said Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said two Ukrainian nationals believed to be working with the Russian secret services were suspected of carrying out the attack, which he called an “unprecedented act of sabotage.”

The explosion took place on a railway line linking the Polish capital Warsaw to Ukraine, and Polish officials said it was used to transport aid to Ukraine.

Russia dismissed accusations that it was involved in the explosion as “Russophobia.”

“The latest sabotage in Poland, which could have turned into a mass casualty event, brings an even more intense dimension to the debate,” Landsbergis told News themezone on Thursday.

“Imagine if there were 100 casualties: would we still talk about hybrid? Or would we abandon hybrid and just call it war and call for Article 5?” Landsbergis said, referring to the mutual defense agreement between members of the l to NATO. “The question points to the fact that the Russians are pushing the escalation lines even further, forcing us to ask ourselves: Aren’t we already at war?”

The incident occurred amid a series of airspace violationsincluding some near airports and military bases, in Western European countries, usually involving unidentified drones, but also, in at least two cases, russian fighter jets.