Dotted among Cornwall’s beautiful beaches and rural villages are a series of squat, unremarkable buildings. They are landing stations for numerous undersea data and communications cables connecting Britain with the US, Europe, Asia and Africa.
Decades after their construction, the buildings – including one in the former surf village of Skewjack – have become a potential target for the Kremlin’s sabotage efforts and work is underway to increase security around the landing stations.
That work has been lent new urgency by Russia’s threats of retaliation over the use of British-made drones by Ukrainian forces.
The Russian Embassy to the UK said the British Government’s actions would “inevitably carry consequences for which it will have to answer”.
“The deeper its involvement in the conflict,” the statement added, “the higher the price it will pay.”
Security sources say that since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has been attempting to raise the cost of supporting Kyiv and undermine public support for intervention in the Ukrainian war across Europe.
A key method has been sabotage across a range of military and civilian targets, including inflicting costly damage on undersea cables.
‘Most vulnerable part of the system’
So far, that damage has mainly been inflicted at sea using ships, including a Russian “shadow fleet” tanker that dragged its anchor along the seabed between Finland and Estonia for almost 60 miles in December 2024.
But a Parliamentary report warned that the stations where the cables reach land “may be the most vulnerable part of the system”. While the locations of military cables are a carefully guarded secret, civilian cables are operated by private companies and the buildings housing them are not concealed.
Widemouth Bay is one of the most-used landing points for transatlantic cables, while Google’s Grace Hopper data cable was photographed being laid beneath Crooklets Beach in Bude in 2021. Several cables converge at the site of a historic RAF base at Skewjack, about two miles inland from Porthcurno.
The remains of a transatlantic cable is exposed at low tide at Sennen Cove (Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty)A report published by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) last September said security risks were intensified by the fact that many landing stations house multiple cables, with Bude in Cornwall alone housing nine.
“Physical security across sites varies – some could be rendered inoperable by sabotage,” the report said. “The terrestrial links between the subsea cable, the landing station and the data centres can also be sabotaged with unsophisticated tools.”
The JCNSS warned that a trend towards critical amounts of data being concentrated in new high-capacity cables would create “a small set of high-value targets”, and that onward connections from the landing stations to data centres create “worrying levels of concentration”.
While the report said that the risk of “severe disruption” was low because of the high number of cables reaching Britain and the ability to reroute data, “we can no longer rule out the possibility of UK infrastructure being targeted in a crisis”.
A ‘point of failure’
Dr Sidharth Kaushal, a senior association fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said that while no damage to UK undersea cables had yet been detected, Russia had been “clearly mapping” cables and conducting surveillance.
In April, the then-defence secretary John Healey said that three Russian submarines had conducted a “covert” spying operation over cables and pipelines north of the UK and that any attempt to sabotage them would “have serious consequences”. The Russian Government denied the allegations.
Dr Kaushal said that at sea, there was a “lot of redundancy” in cable networks because of accidental breakages caused by natural phenomena and human error, but landing stations presented “more of a point of failure”.
“A lot of the landing points for cables which cross the Atlantic converge within the UK,” he said. “Cornwall is an area of particularly dense concentration.”
It could be more difficult for Russia to deploy saboteurs on land in Britain than using ships at sea, Dr Kaushal said, but added such actions could be used to “send a message”.
Widemouth Bay, near Bude, is one of the landing points for undersea cables (Photo: Nik Taylor/Getty)Increasing reliance on undersea cables
Katja Bego, a senior research fellow at Chatham House and the author of the upcoming book Deep Connections: The Hidden Battles to Control Subsea Cables, said the UK was particularly vulnerable to undersea cable sabotage as an island nation.
“They are also becoming more important as infrastructure for our economy, our society,” she told The i Paper. “Also for the military, having access to reliable connectivity, internet and data exchange is critical.”
While Bego said interference with a small number of cables could be mitigated by rerouting traffic, disrupting large numbers of cables at the same time would be “very serious and quite catastrophic”.
The challenge for securing land-based infrastructure, she said, was that it was designed without deliberate sabotage in mind, meaning large numbers of cables were laid close together for practicality and cost reasons.
“That’s not ideal if you want to have something that’s distributed for resilience against things going wrong,” Bego added.
The Government set up a new Undersea Infrastructure Security (UIS) Oversight Board to coordinate security improvements following the JCNSS report last year.
It said security assessments had been carried out at landing stations, and that private operators were being asked to develop emergency repair plans and avoid the “clustering of high-value targets”.
The Government said: “The security and resilience of the UK’s subsea cable network is a national priority, and our international connectivity is highly resilient.
“Alongside NATO and Joint Expeditionary Force allies we’re also ensuring hostile actors cannot operate undetected near UK or NATO waters. We’re deploying new technologies, coordinating patrols, and leading initiatives like Nordic Warden alongside NATO’s Baltic Sentry mission to track and counter undersea threats.
“Working with industry partners and international allies we will ensure these critical assets are protected against evolving threats.”
Hence then, the article about how cornwall s undersea cable stations are at risk of putin s revenge was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( How Cornwall’s undersea cable stations are at risk of Putin’s revenge )
Also on site :
- This ‘Whimsical’ 100% Cotton Throw Blanket With Cottagecore Charm Is Giving Major Anthropologie Vibes for Under $20
- Sur-Seal Rebrands as Cohesive Components Following Acquisition by Brodie Generational Capital Partners
- Rosen Law Firm Encourages Suja Life, Inc. Investors to Inquire About Securities Class Action Investigation - SUJA