On Christmas morning, Estonia’s power grid operators got an unwanted surprise: The Estlink 2 power cable linking them to Finland had failed.
The outage left only the Estlink 1 cable in operation, reducing the electricity flow to Estonia by almost two-thirds.
The rupture had little impact on services due to reserve capacities. However, it sparked fears energy prices would rise while the cable remains offline – potentially for months.
The following day, Finnish officials boarded and detained the Eagle S, a Cook Islands-flagged tanker they said was carrying oil from Russia to Turkey. It had passed over the cable, apparently dragging its anchor, Finnish officials said.
But it was to be the most consequential.
NATO, already tracking incidents of suspected cable-cutting, responded. Within three weeks, the alliance had put a coordinated group of warships to sea specifically to deter such suspected attacks.
Announcing the new surveillance and deterrence mission, dubbed Baltic Sentry, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said he had “grave concern” about a “growing threat to our critical undersea infrastructure.”
While NATO had already stepped up Baltic Sea patrols, and increased coordination with national police and border guards from the nations affected, the December 25 incident was only the latest in what the European Union described as “a series of suspected attacks on critical infrastructure.”
Russia denies any role in the damage. But Pevkur doesn’t buy it, blaming Russia’s sanctions-busting ships, a so-called “shadow fleet” of aging tankers accused of seeking to evade Western restrictions on the sale of Russian oil.
“We are taking this as it is, and we know that these vessels, when we talk about the shadow fleet, are a threat, not only from the security point of view, but first and foremost, from the environmental point of view,” Pevkur said.
It is an open skepticism already shared by many in Baltic Sentry.
The Swedish Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed Sunday it had seized a ship on suspicion of carrying out sabotage, after suspected damage to a communications cable running under the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Latvia.
Suspected Russian connections
“A lot of the ships that we found are acting strangely originate in a Russian port or (are) going to a Russian port,” said Commodore Arjen S. Warnaar, who leads Standing NATO Maritime Group One.
He said ships’ anchors had in some case been dragged “a couple of hundred miles,” adding that in terms of claims the crews had not noticed this was happening, “my guess is, no, a captain does know that” – meaning the anchor dragging was “probably intentional.”
Finnish authorities are yet to announce the findings of their investigation into the Estlink 2 failure.
Russia has denied allegations of involvement in underwater cable sabotage. The Russian Embassy in London last week said NATO was building up naval and air forces under the “fictitious pretext of the ‘Russian threat.’”
Outages’ global impact
Under the Baltic Sea, there are dozens of vulnerable internet and power cables, laid mostly unprotected on the seabed. According to Rutte, more than 95% of internet traffic globally is carried via undersea cables, with some 1.3 million kilometers of such cabling securing an estimated $10 trillion dollars of international trade daily.
Repairs can be costly, and damage can take months to fix. Although undersea networks often have built-in redundancy, a concerted attack could paralyze many nations’ communications networks, jeopardizing hospital surgeries, police responses and more.
Even small outages could deny tens of thousands access to their favorite shows and movies, and impact online shopping and home deliveries.
In a life dependent on the “Internet of Things,” a ship’s anchor dragged hundreds of miles away can ruin your day.
Only last week, according to the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence, the British navy was forced to escort what it described as a Russian spy ship through the narrow English Channel, “weeks after it was caught loitering over critical undersea infrastructure in UK waters.”
Just a day earlier, the UK had announced it was sending maritime aircraft to join the Baltic Sentry operation, alongside ships sent by Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.
France also has a mine hunting ship in the task group, the CMT Croix du Sud.
Earlier this month, French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu decried “aggressive Russian action” after a French maritime patrol aircraft was locked onto by the fire control radar of a Russian S400 air defense system and GPS signals also jammed, while patrolling international airspace as part of Baltic Sentry. GPS jamming is nothing new – for months, it has impeded civilian aircraft landings in the region.
AI helps build ‘patterns of life’
The Baltic Sentry operation is backed up by AI run out of NATO’s new Maritime Centre for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure in the UK.
According to Markussen, a Danish naval captain, the team is building “patterns of life” in the Baltic, watching for anomalies, like ships frequently changing direction, loitering or slowing near critical cabling. “We have this picture of the undersea infrastructure, we compare that with the picture of the surface,” he explained.
With the combined resources of warships, AI, high-tech tracking data and F-35 stealth fighter jets to call on, Markussen says reaction time to suspicious behavior will be “within a half an hour or an hour” – a far cry from the 17 hours for which one ship suspected of sabotage dragged its anchor last year.
But with the speed and muscle of this new operation comes danger, Markussen says. “It’s sensitive because it is an area where we have to balance between this moving into something that can become very ugly – and what I mean by that is warfare.”
It’s not as simple as blaming Russia, he says. “Attribution is difficult,” he explains, adding that “the proof, the smoking gun… It’s, very, very difficult.”
Pevkur, Estonia’s defense minister, whose country has deep historic reasons to fear Russia, and is weeks from disconnecting from a joint energy grid with its far larger eastern neighbor, is also cautious about attributing blame. “We have to stick to the rules and also to the legislation, because this is exactly what Putin wants to see,” he says, referring to the need to build a watertight case to avoid Russia exploiting any doubts or loopholes.
Even so, he says, “it’s not a surprise” that the cable cutting came at this time, or in such an ambiguous way. Russia, he says, has form. “They’ve been using the civil vessels all the time. So, we’ve seen that their intelligence ships are marked as civil, let’s say (for) academic purposes, or whatever. So, this is not a surprise for us.” The Kremlin has previously rejected accusations it used civilian ships for gathering intelligence.
Pevkur sees the cable cutting as an extension of the war in Ukraine, saying Putin wants Western nations “not dealing with Ukraine and (instead) dealing with our own problems.”
Sea drones survey murky depths
At sea, off his coast, the crew of the German minesweeper FGS Datteln is at the sharp end of Baltic Sentry.
Perhaps more than any of the other crews and vessels in Baltic Sentry, they’re transitioning from old-war methods of fighting to the skills of winning a hybrid war. The minesweeper has gone from combatting sea mines to detecting damage to undersea cables.
A few feet above the icy water, on an open deck at the back of the aging warcraft, a rack of red sea drones is stacked up. Each one is about 8 feet (2.4 meters) long, powered by four slender thrusters, and requires three sailors to carefully maneuver it above the water before dropping it the last foot into the sea.
Tethered to the ship by thin orange cabling, wound on a hand-cranked drum, images are relayed from the murky ocean floor.
What the drone operators see below the water, long before any repair crews are called in to fix a damaged cable, could be the trigger that tips diplomacy towards the action that Markussen fears.
If irrefutable evidence of Russian malfeasance is found, NATO will have moved another step closer to confronting its adversary.