How much damage can the Kremlin’s shadow fleet cause to NATO’s undersea cables?

The routes of strategic undersea cables are no secret; the general locations of major fibre-optic networks are known to telecoms companies and published on interactive online maps because they need to be avoided by fishing vessels, ship anchors and drilling operations. But to carry out an attack capable of paralysing a country, it is necessary to know the exact position of the cables on the seabed, and that is precisely what Russia is reportedly doing, according to an exclusive published on Wednesday by The Telegraph, using trawlers that at first glance appear to be ordinary working vessels and which sail alongside other commercial fishing boats to map the UK’s strategic undersea cables. The British newspaper obtained four and a half years’ worth of tracking data from Global Fishing Watch, a satellite platform for monitoring vessels, and compared, across thousands of hours of data, the movements of the Russian fishing vessels with nautical charts showing the cables. What has emerged is that Moscow “is conducting covert operations on the high seas” on a scale never seen before, without being challenged by the Royal Navy and in defiance of repeated warnings from the authorities.

On more than 500 occasions, Russian fishing vessels have gathered above strategic communication cables linking Britain to Europe and the United States, or have followed their route for kilometres; according to nautical charts, 17 vessels have spent “prolonged periods at low speed” in the vicinity of the cables. A source within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation told The Telegraph that NATO is fully aware of “what Russian civilian fishing vessels are doing and where they are... Some of these vessels have never had a single fish on deck’, and according to officials, the precise mapping of critical fibre-optic cables would facilitate an attack on NATO capable of paralysing a country by taking banks, hospitals, transport networks and mobile phone services out of action. The Telegraph has identified three telling cases. In one, Russian fishing vessels monitored nine cables linking Western Europe to the United States over a four-year period; in April, they spent 337 hours near the Atlantic Crossing 1 telecommunications system, which connects the United States to Germany, off the Faroe Islands. Just a few months ago, a joint operation by Britain, Norway and the United States intercepted Russian submarines training to use a secret weapon designed to disable critical undersea cables without leaving a trace – an operation led by the Gugi, Moscow’s underwater warfare directorate.

Yesterday, the British government published a document outlining a plan to combat sabotage of undersea cables: tougher penalties for those convicted of tampering with undersea internet cables or gas pipelines, and orders for telecoms companies to remove or deactivate services during national security emergencies: “Submarine cables carry the energy and data on which our country relies every day. Protecting them is vital to our national security,” said Security Minister Dan Jarvis.