The Kremlin is proving its ability to probe British waters, and the Royal Navy is stretching to defend itself. The undersea arms race has begun, but there are fears that the UK has started running long after the start gun was fired.
Newly released details from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) reveal that a Russian submarine followed one of Moscow’s most notorious spy ships, the Yantar, in the Irish sea last year. The MoD has declassified a photo of the incident.
Covert submarines have monitored deep-sea critical infrastructure, while a “shadow fleet” of undercover cargo ships have cut communication lines, launched drone incursions and transported suspected spies into the UK – as revealed by The i Paper.
The MoD says Russian incursions into UK waters have increased by 30 per cent over the past two years and warn that Vladimir Putin is piling more funding into Russia’s undersea weaponry.
Russia has long been testing UK defences through grey zone warfare tactics – a form of military aggression that doesn’t meet the definition of direct conflict. But a senior Nato maritime official has told this paper that more overt military acts like this are a nod back to “the good old Cold War”.
The latest revelations show that the undersea arms race has already begun, and the UK – by its own admission – is “stretched” to keep pace.
How is the UK defending itself from Russia?
Britain is building up its undersea resilience with a new hybrid naval force, named Atlantic Bastion. Comprising warships, patrol aircraft, uncrewed boats and drones, the fleet aims protect critical undersea cables and pipelines from Putin’s submarines.
The Royal Navy’s Type 26 frigates – a 150-metre long warship with built-in state-of-the-art surveillance technology – will form the backbone of the “hybrid navy”. Each ship is designed to deploy uncrewed surface and underwater vessels, acting as a command centre for a wider monitoring network.
Inside the Atlantic Bastion – the new defence against Russian undersea cable attacks (Photo: Richard Holmes)First Sea Lord Sir Gwyn Jenkins said earlier this month that Russia was increasing investment into its deep-sea submarine division, known as Gugi, and warned that without the same investment, the UK “will not stay ahead”.
“If you look at the Russian capabilities out of the northern fleet [in the Atlantic], their funding has continued to flow despite the war in Ukraine,” he said. “They consider it an area of expertise and advantage for them.”
The UK’s Atlantic Bastion fleet has so far received a mere £14m investment, with a vast amount coming from the private sector. There is growing concern among military chiefs about the gap between the ambition and the budget of the Government on defence spending.
So far, submarine incursions in UK waters have only tested our ability to monitor them. During the incident last year an anti-submarine Merlin Mk2 helicopter and a British hunter-killer submarine shadowed the Russian vessels.
A Royal Navy vessel shadowing the Kilo-class Russian submarine Krasnodar and its tugboat through the English Channel earlier this month (Photo: Royal Navy)Emma Salisbury, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said monitoring these activities is the “first step”, but added the UK is hamstrung in what else it can do as the Russians “walk right up to the line” of what the Navy can respond to militarily.
“The Kremlin relies on this for its provocative activities all over Europe,” she told The i Paper. “While I have no doubt that the Royal Navy could easily disable or destroy both the Yantar and its escort, doing so in the current context is not possible, so it will keep up its intelligence-gathering activities.”
An unfair race: Britain’s undersea vulnerability
The UK, unlike Russia, is highly reliant on a sprawling network of deep-sea cables and infrastructure for communications, power and internet. A successful attack on UK undersea cables could lead to major power and phone signal blackouts, disrupt emergency responses and the financial sector.
The UK’s pipeline of subsea internet and power cables makes the undersea arms race with Russia unfair, according to the senior Nato official.
They said: “The situation is a little biased as it is us [the West] that are having most of the underwater infrastructure and we are extremely dependent on it.”
A Parliamentary report released earlier this year warned the UK still had inadequate security measures to protect them.
“We can no longer rule out the possibility of UK infrastructure being targeted in a crisis,” the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) found. “We are also not confident that the UK could prevent such attacks or recover within an acceptable time period”.
The UK is almost entirely reliant on subsea cables to transmit its data to the outside world, with some 45 cables connecting Britain to other countries, carrying essential power supplies and vast quantities of data including financial information.
Subsea cables in UK and surrounding waters (Photo: KIS-ORCA)In recent years, more than 50 Russian vessels have been observed around areas of high cable density in the Baltic Sea, according to the JCNSS report. This summer, the UK sanctioned Gugi – the Russian military agency leading the development of Russia’s underwater intelligence gathering operations.
Salisbury warned that Gugi’s increased activity near UK shores was a show of Russia’s intent to gather intelligence through any means necessary.
“If the submarine was one of Gugi’s, it would have been working alongside the Yantar to gather intelligence on British undersea infrastructure,” she said, “likely with a view to assessing how best to sabotage it in the event of a conflict.”
Putin’s overt provocations against the West are a reminder of the constant military threat posed by the country. By floating near Britain’s shoreline, the Kremlin’s fleet can attempt to intimidate and simulate a critical attack on the UK – one that could leave us scrambling in the dark to respond to.
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