Cables deep underneath the Baltic Sea hold getting broken – here’s what Nato is doing to guard them | EUROtoday
A French Navy surveillance airplane, outfitted with a strong digicam, meticulously scans the Baltic Sea, zooming in on cargo ships and scrutinising particulars like deck exercise and chimney smoke.
The Atlantique 2 plane, a part of a brand new Nato mission, spent greater than 5 hours patrolling the huge expanse from Germany to Estonia, its sensors gathering essential knowledge.
This heightened surveillance, each within the air and at sea, indicators Nato’s intensified efforts to guard underwater infrastructure within the Baltic. The alliance is responding to a regarding rise in incidents involving injury to very important vitality and knowledge cables and pipelines.
The new mission, “Baltic Sentry,” goals to discourage and forestall future sabotage makes an attempt.
Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte emphasised the alliance’s resolve, stating, “We will do everything in our power to make sure that we fight back, that we are able to see what is happening and then take the next steps to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. And our adversaries should know this.”
The message is evident: Nato is dedicated to safeguarding the financial pursuits of the Baltic area by defending its crucial underwater infrastructure.
![Pilot Lt. Terry (surname withheld by the French military) inspects the wheels of a French Navy Atlantique 2 surveillance plane before its takeoff from Hamburg, Germany](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/28/05/France_NATO_Baltic_Cables_33708.jpg)
What’s underneath the Baltic?
Power and communications cables and gasoline pipelines sew collectively the 9 international locations with shores on the Baltic, a comparatively shallow and almost landlocked sea.
A couple of examples are the 94-mile Balticconnector pipeline that carries gasoline between Finland and Estonia, the high-voltage Baltic Cable connecting the facility grids of Sweden and Germany, and the 729-mile C-Lion1 telecommunications cable between Finland and Germany.
Why are cables necessary?
Undersea pipes and cables assist energy economies, hold homes heat and join billions of individuals. More than 807,800 miles of fibre optic cables — greater than sufficient to stretch to the moon and again — span the world’s oceans and seas, in keeping with TeleGeography, which tracks and maps the very important communication networks. The cables are usually the width of a backyard hose.
But 97 per cent of the world’s communications, together with trillions of kilos of economic transactions, go by way of them every day.
“In the final two months alone, we now have seen injury to a cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden, one other connecting Germany and Finland, and most not too long ago, a variety of cables linking Estonia and Finland. Investigations of all of those circumstances are nonetheless ongoing. But there may be cause for grave concern,” Rutte said on 14 January.
What’s causing alarm?
At least 11 Baltic cables have been damaged since October 2023 — the most recent being a fibre optic cable connecting Latvia and the Swedish island of Gotland, reported to have ruptured on Sunday. Although cable operators note that subsea cable damage is commonplace, the frequency and concentration of incidents in the Baltic heightened suspicions that damage might have been deliberate.
There also are fears that Russia could target cables as part of a wider campaign of so-called “hybrid warfare” to destabilise European nations helping Ukraine defend itself against the full-scale invasion that Moscow has been pursuing since 2022.
Without specifically blaming Russia, Rutte said: “Hybrid means sabotage. Hybrid means cyber-attacks. Hybrid means sometimes even assassination attacks, attempts, and in this case, it means hitting on our critical undersea infrastructure.”
Finnish police suspect that the Eagle S, an oil tanker that damaged the Estlink 2 power cable and two other communications cables linking Finland and Estonia on 25 December, is part of Moscow’s “shadow fleet” used to avoid war-related sanctions on Russian oil exports.
Finnish authorities seized the tanker shortly after it left a Russian port and apparently cut the cables by dragging its anchor. Finnish investigators allege the ship left an almost 62-mile long anchor trail on the seabed.
Several Western intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of their work, told The Associated Press that recent damage was most likely accidental, seemingly caused by anchors being dragged by ships that were poorly maintained and poorly crewed.
One senior intelligence official said that ships’ logs and mechanical failures with ships’ anchors were among “multiple indications” pointing away from Russian sabotage. The official said Russian cables were also severed.
Another Western official, also speaking anonymously to discuss intelligence matters, said Russia sent an intelligence-gathering vessel to the site of one cable rupture to investigate the damage.
The Washington Post first reported on the emerging consensus among U.S. and European security services that maritime accidents likely caused recent damage.
Cable operators advise caution
The European Subsea Cables Association, representing cable owners and operators, noted in November after faults were reported on two Baltic links that, on average, a subsea cable is damaged somewhere in the world every three days. In northern European waters, the main causes of damage are commercial fishing or ship anchors, it said.
In the fibre-optic cable rupture on Sunday connecting Latvia and Sweden, Swedish authorities detained a Maltese-flagged ship bound for South America with a cargo of fertilizer.
Navibulgar, a Bulgarian company that owns the Vezhen, said any damage was unintentional and that the ship’s crew discovered while navigating in extremely bad weather that its left anchor appeared to have dragged on the seabed.
NATO’s ‘Baltic Sentry’ mission
![Crew members on an observation mission](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/28/05/France_NATO_Baltic_Cables_21451.jpg)
The alliance is deploying warships, maritime patrol plane and naval drones for the mission to offer “enhanced surveillance and deterrence.”
Aboard the French Navy surveillance flight, the 14-member crew cross-checked ships they noticed from the air towards lists of vessels that they had been ordered to look at for.
“If we witness some suspicious activities from ships as sea – for example, ships at very low speed or at anchorage in a position that they shouldn’t be at this time – so this is something we can see,” stated the flight commander, Lt. Alban, whose surname was withheld by the French army for safety causes.
“We can have a very close look with our sensors to see what is happening.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/undersea-cables-baltic-russia-nato-b2687491.html