Nato governments released fresh details this week of how, earlier this year, they intercepted a Russian operation practising a new method of targeting vital subsea cables. It was a worrying development as Vladimir Putin continues to escalate his sabotage campaigns against Europe.
Western officials told Reuters that Russian submarines were engaged in training to deploy a secret weapon, one designed to disable critical infrastructure without leaving a trace of who was behind it.
The unnamed officials said the operation was carried out by Russia’s secretive undersea warfare directorate, using deep-sea submersibles, but that it was prevented from completing the exercise and left the area. Norway and the UK then confronted Moscow with their findings, hoping to make Russia hesitate to use the new technology, they added.
In many ways, Russia was testing new solutions to achieve an old objective – cutting communications cables is a tactic almost as old as the cables themselves, while trying to interfere with them without their owners being aware is also a practice that goes back decades.
Throughout the 1980s, monitoring and countering the Soviets’ deep-sea probing was already part of the mission of Western submarines and maritime special forces.
It’s significant, however, that the recent Russian operation was targeting cables in the High North, between Norway and the Svalbard archipelago, which is one area of the world where interference with individual cables can have a huge impact. Two 800-mile subsea fibre-optic cables link Svalbard to mainland Norway and carry vital satellite data.
Cables in that region are relatively few in number, as opposed to areas such as the Baltic Sea, which is criss-crossed by power and communications lines providing greater redundancy. As a result, the threat is more severe.
An undersea cable being laid in the Baltic Sea (Photo: Jens Köhler/ullstein bild via Getty)We first heard that something had happened in the murky depths back in April, when the British government referred vaguely to a Russian operation “north of the UK”. It’s not clear why more details have been released now – including the involvement of US naval assets alongside their Nato allies the UK and Norway (which had been hinted at in earlier press releases).
But we shouldn’t be surprised by Russia’s efforts. This latest incident comes more than a decade after the deep-water battlespace came to broad public attention following Russia’s dramatic increase in its probing for vulnerabilities in civilian telecommunications infrastructure.
In the years since, we have seen threats and incidents around the world.
Details of Russia’s new weapon are still incomplete and vague. That’s in part because, as ever, much of what happens in the subsea domain is deeply classified, and when details do occasionally surface, it’s rare for them to give a clear picture of what is going on.
Moscow’s attacks and developing tactics are a response to its realisation of the power of information, and of cutting it off. This was a tactic deployed against Crimea before it seized the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
Russia considered that a key part of its success there was the way it had not only taken control of local media in the weeks leading up to putting troops on the ground, but had also, at the very start of the intervention, seized Crimea’s only internet exchange point and its cable connections to the rest of Ukraine.
Encouraged by that success, the Kremlin has stepped up operations designed to work out where a similar effect could be possible. It has also looked for vulnerabilities in the West’s satellite communications, fibre-optic connections on land, and online space where it has practised shutting down competing sources of information.
Attacks on cables are just part of a broad range of measures Russia could use to coerce or harm countries like the UK – and Moscow has worked hard at overcoming the challenge of distance.
Russia’s Kilo class submarine Rostov-on-Don passes through the Bosphorus at Istanbul on the way to the Black Sea in February 2022 (Photo: Ozan Kose/AFP)We shouldn’t think of Russia’s moves against undersea cable connections in isolation. It has a wide range of ways it can make life difficult for countries it chooses to target – and the people living in them. Cyber attacks and proxy sabotage operations, such as the one foiled in Swindon last week, are just individual items on Russia’s menu of long-range malevolence.
In the past I have written about just how deficient the UK’s resilience plans are, compared to countries that have taken the Russian threat far more seriously. I was lucky to be part of Sky’s upcoming Wargame series, and that was a vulnerability I was able to use when laying out Russia’s options for targeting the UK.
The “Russians”, including me, were able to help themself from a large menu, with viewers only seeinga small sample of what we threw into the mix to challenge and confound the team playing the UK.
That’s why initiatives like the UK’s long delayed “national conversation on defence” are so critical – and why they must include not just overhauling conventional armed forces but also helping people and societies protect themselves at times of disruption.
The beauty of resilience planning is that it is universal. Preparation for disruption is equally valuable whether it is caused by floods, wildfires, Russian mischief or anything else that upsets the delicate balance of daily life.
The UK is late to start that planning, but the latest signs that Putin is targeting the West’s undersea communications shows the urgent need to make progress.
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