'Shadow fleets' and sabotage: are Europe's undersea cables under attack? (opens in new tab)

Do you know how long these cables are? How many subs do you think you would need? Actually, surface ships would probably be more effective, but you would still need infeasible numbers of them.

I would think offering rewards for information could be a good deterrent.

It takes a decent amount of coordination, equipment, and crew to pull off these missions.

I imagine many people on these ships aren’t getting paid that great.

By offering levels of rewards for information about what organizations are being used to funnel money and equipment into this, it might help bring some level of prosecution, as well as make the missions more difficult to operate as there will be a lot less trust.

Submarines aren't really well suited for this. You want something that can search and monitor over a wide area, and then the ability to intercept and potentially search/seize a suspicious vessel. The primary attribute of submarines is stealth, which is not relevant here.

What you want is a combination of maritime patrol aircraft and offshore patrol craft. Maritime patrol aircraft (helicopter, fixed wing aircraft, UAVs) are equipped with surface search radar and other sensors that enable them to monitor a wide area. The patrol craft are also fitted with radars and sensors, and can also move to intercept a suspicious ship. A helicopter could also potentially be used for intercept

and look for what? ships with lines out? then do what? they already track ships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

Nope. Also you don't want one of these anchors be anywhere near a submarine.

We cannot prevent it, we can only detect it and (try to) identify who did it. The planet (some special interest areas) are constantly being monitored (satellites, surveillance drones) and when large ships are not being 'naughty' (switch of transponders) it's relatively easy to put two and two together.

As a side-note, Russia's playbook it to cause small and frequent sabotage(s). Small enough to not cause massive retaliation (i.e. it forces someone to destroy their railroad infra by causing thousands of derailments within one hour), and frequent enough to cause actual damage.

No. They just need to capture or sink one caught pulling cables up.

This is only effective because there are no real consequences for it.

I'm still praying for the future of trained whale-on-whale submarine cable offense/defense action.

How would that work. You're not going to sink the ship without an environmental disaster.

Maybe, but the Gulf of Finland alone (where the incidents with the Eagle 2 occurred) is 30.000 square kilometers; the amount of ships (or planes etc) and coverage you need and the associated cost is huge.

I mean putting an officer / escort on board of each ship to make sure they're not doing anything weird would be an option, but I'm fairly sure that's against international law or anything. The issue is also that these are international waters - the Eagle went right through a narrow corridor of international waters - where it's a bit of the wild west.

No, because a submarine is pretty useless against an excavator.

The problem with that math is that you can't catch them all. Russia has been gauging Europe's response by attacking cables close by, but there's no reason to believe they won't strike other strategic targets that are harder to monitor in future.

The current approach, to zig-zag over a cable with the anchor, is extremely obvious, but they could just as well have an entire fleet of ships just casually drag their anchor when passing over their targeted cable until one of them catches it. With a bit of planning, a large number of unrelated ships could be over one or more cables at the time the cable snaps, making it rather difficult (and therefore expensive) to figure out which ship is behind the attack.

The value of their crude oil fleet is also rather diminished by sanctions now that they can't sell as much crude oil as they could before.

For this specific attack, the ship being forfeited would be a net win. However, for the many other sabotaged cables, that's not happening. I think Russia gladly pays a couple thousand euros a day to sabotage European communications for weeks, as well as trick European/NATO fleets to show themselves and demonstrate how they behave when they're looking for trouble.

Countries spend money on war, look at Russia and Ukraine.

The losses from a broken cable are more than just the cost of repair.

How are running costs an asset forfeiture?

The solution is to require ships to be inspected and registered if they want to sail through Denmarks territorial waters.

Accidental cable cuts happen all the time, but there is clear proof of intentional sabotage for some of the recent cuts.

I believe this is akin to the US flying obvious spy planes over countries at altitudes they can't stop them at even if they wanted to: a show of force, likely unrelated to how a full-on military conflict would work.

If Russia wanted to make these attacks look like an accident, they could've sent fishing ships or at least pick more believable anchor points.

And the next line says: " Yet, Mooney said the pattern associated with the cable fault events that have occurred in the Baltic Sea in the past 15 months makes it unlikely that none of them were intentional."

I'm Finnish. I don't recall ever hearing about a cable being cut in the Baltic Sea before 2022, and based on quick Googling, cannot find any reports of such incidents either. And now they occur several times per year. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

NATO sent a flotilla of ships to patrol the Baltic off Finland, in response to damage to undersea cables. One would hope (!) that was based on a genuine problem existing an not just a media-driven misrepresentation of normal levels of cable damage.

Europe doesn't want an armed conflict with Russia. Even if Europe would be willing to sacrifice as many people in a conflict as Russia has, they'd still be up against a megalomaniac dictator with nukes. Real victory in a traditional war against Russia is unattainable. Same with China, or the US, or possibly India; the people in power are willing to look crazy enough to choose nuclear armageddon as a last resort.

And it's not like Europe isn't fighting back. European intelligence has been deep inside Russian networks since before the first invasion of Ukraine. From the European side, the invasion of Ukraine is a proxy war, with billions of euros spent on fighting Russia, while to Russia the war is a normal invasion with Russian (and now North Korean) troops on the ground.

The way Europe (except for Ukraine, of course) is fighting Russia mostly benefits Europe, as far as I can tell. Most of Europe's losses, so far, have been economical. Switching to a war economy to defend against Russia would probably cost more and be less effective. Until Ukraine falls, I don't see why Europe would want to change that deal.

The EU just announced a series of financial measures designed to support a massive level of re-armament by member states. I don't think we are in denial. Whether we can effectively respond is a different question.

Several of the EU sanctions explicitly state as a rationale that they are in reaction to Russia’s hybrid activities against the EU member states.

It's not in denial, rather Kissinger's problem seem to not have been solved.

Henry Kissinger: "Who do I call if I want to call Europe?"

The irony of Trump being in power is that this might just happen during his term. I really hope so.

Laying a mine field across the whole length of major waterways probably isn't a very good idea. Plus, maintaining a mine field and preventing innocent deaths would probably cost more than the inconvenience and monetary damages of repairing the broken cables.

You seem to have the mistaken impression that booby traps aren't horribly problematic.

Would you advocate the border control should point guns at anyone who crosses the border? Or is that a needless risk to the safety of humans?

I'd ask you to consider for a moment, exactly what is going to happen to that mine? I assume you thought it would damage or destroy any anchor dragged across the cable? Well it's really hard to predict how much damage it would cause but lets assume it works exactly as you hope and say it only destroys the anchor chain of the boat. What if there's a storm, and that ship can't anchor safely, but because it's run by incompetent, or evil people they don't care, and try to park near another ship crash into it. Both ships sink and a bunch of innocent people on the ship that just happened to park in the wrong place, die. That's assuming all the people on the "evil ship" were involved and weren't just hired to work delivering cargo.

You admitted it was a stupid question, but I'd like to suggest you should avoid defaulting to suggesting death and destruction. A better stupid question would be "why can't we armor the cables" instead of "why can't we hurt other people"

For all the length of the cable? Anyway, ships must let have routes to pass over those cables or we would partition the seas into small patches. Any ship passing over a cable between two mines can cut it.

Edit: or do you mean mines anchored to the cable on the sea floor? That would make it easier to kaboom the cable instead of cutting it.

Seems like a massive hazard if a natural thing severs a cable and requires maintenance. Plus the removal at some point, presumably. Would suck for true accidents to have human lives on top of the damage.

I imagine there must be some other deterrent measure but drawing a blank. My brother was the navy man...

The Baltic sea is full of civilian traffic!

You have a pattern of writing shallow dismissals (including deflections to other topics) about anything aligned with the current US administration grievances, are you one of the true believers?

I bet a few years ago you were also convinced Russia would never invade Ukraine.