The undersea cable war
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A handout picture released by the Britain's Ministry of Defence (MOD) in London on January 22 shows Royal Navy Type 23 frigate HMS Somerset (foreground) patrolling near the Russian vessel Yantar, near U.K. waters, earlier this week.
NATO said last week it’s sending frigates, aircraft and naval drones to patrol the Baltic Sea, and the question is what took so long. The deployment follows multiple suspected acts of sabotage targeting Europe’s undersea cables. Add another threat to the West’s burgeoning list.
Nearly all of the world’s international data is transmitted through subsea fiber-optic cables. The French government recently described them as “the accessible physical layer of cyberspace," and they’re vital for everything from financial transactions to diplomatic communications to video streaming. That makes cables a prime military and espionage target.
The Yantar, a Russian spy ship “used for gathering intelligence and mapping the U.K.’s critical underwater infrastructure," is now in the North Sea after sailing through the English Channel, British Defense Secretary John Healeysaid Wednesday. In November the U.K. detected the Yantar “loitering over critical undersea infrastructure." On Christmas Day a cable connecting Finland and Estonia was damaged by an anchor dragged across it.
Finnish authorities detained crew members and a tanker identified by the maritime-traffic analytics company Lloyd’s List Intelligence as part of a Russia-linked shadow fleet. The probe continues, but the lead investigator this week described “suspicions of deliberate action." Two more Baltic cables—one between Sweden and Lithuania and another between Germany and Finland—were severed a month earlier. “No
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