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'Shadow fleets' and sabotage: are Europe's undersea cables under attack?
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoWould European nations having big fleets of submarines patrolling the waters reduce the chances of such sabotages?
- hulitu 2y agoNo, because a submarine is pretty useless against an excavator.
- Gravityloss 2y agoexcavators don't typically operate in international waters though...
- Polizeiposaune 2y agoI think this was intended as snark about how one of the recent Baltic submarine cable outages was eventually attributed to on-shore damage from an excavator.
- HenryBemis 2y agoNope. Also you don't want one of these anchors be anywhere near a submarine. We cannot prevent it, we can only detect it and (try to) identify who did it. The planet (some special interest areas) are constantly being monitored (satellites, surveillance drones) and when large ships are not being 'naughty' (switch of transponders) it's relatively easy to put two and two together. As a side-note, Russia's playbook it to cause small and frequent sabotage(s). Small enough to not cause massive retaliation (i.e. it forces someone to destroy their railroad infra by causing thousands of derailments within one hour), and frequent enough to cause actual damage.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago>We cannot prevent it Then why don't these sabotages happen in US waters if it's so easy to get away with it?
- HenryBemis 2y agoIf you want to piss someone off do you go for the black belt dude carrying a shotgun or (for the same amount of damage) a 5yo kid?
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoSo then why am I wrong when I suggest if EU's navies were stronger then sabotages would go down?
- willvarfar 2y agoits not about hard power necessarily, but soft power. If the EU united politically and made these harassment attacks consequential then they would stop. E.g. perhaps something along the lines of prison for captains who were 'derelict in duty', rewards to crews who grass and seizing ships that, by dragging anchors 'by accident', have proven themselves unseaworthy etc.
- benterix 2y agoI believe something like this will happen, sooner or later. For now, it's not easily to organize as the crew can always use the excuse "oh, this was unintentional" but charging them with the cost of repair plus additional penalty could be a good starting point.
- mschuster91 2y ago> but charging them with the cost of repair plus additional penalty could be a good starting point. Good luck enforcing that. The "shadow fleet" ships all operate under flags of convenience and ownership is hidden behind layers upon layers of shell companies.
- lithos 2y agoHow would that work. You're not going to sink the ship without an environmental disaster.
- ratg13 2y agoI would think offering rewards for information could be a good deterrent. It takes a decent amount of coordination, equipment, and crew to pull off these missions. I imagine many people on these ships aren’t getting paid that great. By offering levels of rewards for information about what organizations are being used to funnel money and equipment into this, it might help bring some level of prosecution, as well as make the missions more difficult to operate as there will be a lot less trust.
- tucnak 2y ago> It takes a decent amount of coordination, equipment, and crew to pull off these missions. They're dragging anchors on the marine floor; all coordination, equipment and crew are already there as a medium-sized fishing vessel is perfectly sufficient for this job.
- zabzonk 2y agoDo you know how long these cables are? How many subs do you think you would need? Actually, surface ships would probably be more effective, but you would still need infeasible numbers of them.
- croisillon 2y agogood thinking, which doesn't refrain the cops to driving rounds every 5 minutes in every pedestrian zones of the city
- ethersteeds 2y agoGood thinking, which doesn't make the size of the Baltic Sea comparable to the size of a city, nor the costs of a fleet of cars with a single driver comparable to the costs of a fleet of ships with full crews. It's tempting to say "if it's such a problem why don't they just monitor better?", but the ocean is vast.
- zabzonk 2y agoi don't know about your city, but doesn't happen in any in the uk.
- croisillon 2y agolucky you, i have read the UK police is mostly well behaved
- zabzonk 2y agoand so, where are you? and how many cops does your city have?
- croisillon 2y agoVienna, Austria, cops everywhere
- someothherguyy 2y agoand look for what? ships with lines out? then do what? they already track ships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...
- mschuster91 2y agoMany ships intentionally turn off AIS, partially because there is barely any enforcement.
- someothherguyy 2y agohttps://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/learning-more-about-dark-fishing-vessels-activities-sea https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/learning-more-a...
- mschuster91 2y agoYep that is exactly what I meant, thanks for providing a background source.
- jeroenhd 2y agoI refuse to believe that AIS is the only way ships are being tracked. I think it's probably more likely that nobody is using their military intelligence to track fishing boats.
- mschuster91 2y agoThere's over 100k merchant sea vessels, and that does not include ships that nominally aren't supposed to be on high seas either. It's simply infeasible to do so, unless you're stacking high definition cameras with high precision accuracy control onto Starlink satellites.
- someothherguyy 2y ago
- escapecharacter 2y agoI'm still praying for the future of trained whale-on-whale submarine cable offense/defense action.
- epoxy_sauce 2y agoDolphins maybe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal
- escapecharacter 2y agoI'm aware of the dolphins. It's become an in-joke among friends that the Crimean invasion started to get the military dolphins back for the cable attacks. However, dolphins don't have as much depth capacity as other whales. I'd choose sperm whales for this, if they were trainable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiology_of_underwater_diving#Range_of_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiology_of_underwater_divin...
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoMaybe, but the Gulf of Finland alone (where the incidents with the Eagle 2 occurred) is 30.000 square kilometers; the amount of ships (or planes etc) and coverage you need and the associated cost is huge. I mean putting an officer / escort on board of each ship to make sure they're not doing anything weird would be an option, but I'm fairly sure that's against international law or anything. The issue is also that these are international waters - the Eagle went right through a narrow corridor of international waters - where it's a bit of the wild west.
- Polizeiposaune 2y agoThere's a long-standing requirement at major ports that a local harbor pilot be on board to guide ships on their way in or out of a harbor. Requiring an observer on board when transiting areas with a concentration of critical underwater infrastructure seems at least conceptually similar -- though the logistics of making it happen would be very different.
- ohgr 2y agoNo. They just need to capture or sink one caught pulling cables up. This is only effective because there are no real consequences for it.
- openasocket 2y agoSubmarines aren't really well suited for this. You want something that can search and monitor over a wide area, and then the ability to intercept and potentially search/seize a suspicious vessel. The primary attribute of submarines is stealth, which is not relevant here. What you want is a combination of maritime patrol aircraft and offshore patrol craft. Maritime patrol aircraft (helicopter, fixed wing aircraft, UAVs) are equipped with surface search radar and other sensors that enable them to monitor a wide area. The patrol craft are also fitted with radars and sensors, and can also move to intercept a suspicious ship. A helicopter could also potentially be used for intercept
- aaron695 2y agoYep, Russia is risking it's $80 billion per year in oil sales shadow fleet to cut cables that haven't once caused HN users to lose their porn for even a day. Cool story bro's keep smoking it up now it's legal along with big pharma, what could go wrong. These ships can barely stop their anchor safety equipment from rusting out but they are full of secret spy stuff to cut cables. I think once someone saw a keyboard with Russian letters on it even. Better question is Russia really getting Ukrainians to suicide bomb recruitment stations? - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/07/ukraine-recruitment-centers-attacks/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/07/ukraine-recr... I don't think they are, Europe spreads this disinformation as lame wanna-bes pretending they are also under attack, Russia is burning down their Ikeas. To avoid pay them, is quite laugh out loud - "remotely detonates the explosive early — to kill the witness and also avoid paying them"
- piva00 2y agoYou have a pattern of writing shallow dismissals (including deflections to other topics) about anything aligned with the current US administration grievances, are you one of the true believers?
- regularjack 2y agoI bet a few years ago you were also convinced Russia would never invade Ukraine.
- roenxi 2y agoIf the headline is a serious question, it'd be helpful to have an #incidents/year chart in here somewhere. The article includes "According to the Recorded Future analyst Matt Mooney, between 100 and 200 cable outages occur every year" but it is easy to miss if someone doesn't go looking for the statistic.
- benterix 2y agoAnd the next line says: " Yet, Mooney said the pattern associated with the cable fault events that have occurred in the Baltic Sea in the past 15 months makes it unlikely that none of them were intentional."
- roenxi 2y agoIntentional can mean a lot of things. Some plane crashes are caused by suicidal pilots. I'm sure there is the occasional captain or crew member who just goes postal and decides to take his anger out on infrastructure. This sounds like a situation where even if it is deliberate enemy action the appropriate thing to do is ask them to stop. Maybe invite the Chinese diplomats in, tell them to stop, then expel the embassy for a week and then allocate some extra budget to cable repairs. If we're talking about - and I quote the article - a "sabotage campaign aimed at destabilising Nato allies" then it'd look more like the Nord Stream explosions; big showy events where the US looks so suspicious that we can almost dismiss their involvement because that'd be too obvious. Random cable cutting is a bit too weird in that it doesn't sound like it achieves anything and seems too subtle an attack to have a motive.
- benterix 2y agoDestroying NS seemed significant at the time but not anymore - we've drastically reduced dependency on Russian gas so it makes no sense to build/open new infra for that. And even if the war ends, Europeans will be ware of sending their money to a country that may use it against them.
- anamax 2y ago
- jl6 2y ago> It then carried on across four undersea fibreoptic cables, three of which registered failures around the time the ship crossed them. The ship was suspected by Finnish authorities of having dragged its anchor to damage the cables and was escorted into custody. The ship in this case was the Eagle S, estimated to be costing the owner €14,500 per day in running costs while impounded.[0] If the owners abandon the ship, that's a ~$30m asset forfeited, which could be used to compensate the cable owner for the damage. How much does it cost to fix a broken cable? Here's one estimate saying $2m[1]. Monitoring cable breaks + rapid reaction + police investigation + asset seizure + criminal prosecution = increases the cost of this attack. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_S [1] https://subtelforum.com/8m-to-restore-subsea-cable-services/ https://subtelforum.com/8m-to-restore-subsea-cable-services/
- jeroenhd 2y agoThe problem with that math is that you can't catch them all. Russia has been gauging Europe's response by attacking cables close by, but there's no reason to believe they won't strike other strategic targets that are harder to monitor in future. The current approach, to zig-zag over a cable with the anchor, is extremely obvious, but they could just as well have an entire fleet of ships just casually drag their anchor when passing over their targeted cable until one of them catches it. With a bit of planning, a large number of unrelated ships could be over one or more cables at the time the cable snaps, making it rather difficult (and therefore expensive) to figure out which ship is behind the attack. The value of their crude oil fleet is also rather diminished by sanctions now that they can't sell as much crude oil as they could before. For this specific attack, the ship being forfeited would be a net win. However, for the many other sabotaged cables, that's not happening. I think Russia gladly pays a couple thousand euros a day to sabotage European communications for weeks, as well as trick European/NATO fleets to show themselves and demonstrate how they behave when they're looking for trouble.
- ethbr1 2y agoThe counter to this is: 1) Rapid identification and localization of breaks, so military/police forces can be dispatched to the area. 2) Continuous deployment of MQ-9B SeaGuardian or HALE UAV platforms around shallow cable runs to locate and id dark ships, who would also be running nav beacons before and after. 3) Low-earth-orbit persistent sensing networks (e.g. what's now called PWSA [0]) with ship id'ing sensor packages. As parent notes though, the lynchpin of this is inverting the cost:benefit ratio to be unfavorable, by raising the likelihood that ships will be detained and ultimately seized. Even oligarchs don't like to light money on fire. [0] https://spacenews.com/space-force-preparing-for-the-age-of-proliferated-low-earth-orbit-satellite-networks/ https://spacenews.com/space-force-preparing-for-the-age-of-p...
- Havoc 2y agoThat does seem to be the new Cold War of sorts. Attacks that are indirect and easier to deny than kinetic attacks
- dghughes 2y agoAn undersea cable between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia has also been cleanly cut. Twice. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/bell-subsea-fibre-optic-cable-newfoundland-1.7461963 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/bell-subsea-fibre...
- miroljub 2y agoAfter North Stream sabotage, any similar action in international waters is a fair game. If you didn't bother to properly investigate NS, why bother with some random cable?
- SanjayMehta 2y agoMaybe it was a small group of drunk civilians on rented yacht? https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explosion-real-story-da24839c?mod=RSSMSN https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...
- throwaway48476 2y agoRussia has been waging a hybrid warfare campaign against Europe for a while now. Of course Europe is still in denial.
- p2detar 2y agoIt's not in denial, rather Kissinger's problem seem to not have been solved. Henry Kissinger: "Who do I call if I want to call Europe?" The irony of Trump being in power is that this might just happen during his term. I really hope so.
- nmeofthestate 2y agoThe EU just announced a series of financial measures designed to support a massive level of re-armament by member states. I don't think we are in denial. Whether we can effectively respond is a different question.
- throwaway48476 2y agoRearmament is stupid. For every $1 spent destroying Russian equipment it's equivalent to $10 not spent on deterrence over the next 10 years. The only thing more expensive than a war is an arms race.
- consp 2y agoIt's also a way to subsidize your own country by subsidizing the arms industry. Pretty much what has happened in the US in the past years (pretty much all "gifts" are subsidies of the arms industry).
- ethbr1 2y agoThe combination of both is usually optimal. - Investing in deterrence is cost effective... up to a point. - Directly sending Ukraine arms is cost effective... up to a point. Right now, it's fair to say that (relative to Russia) Europe has been underinvesting in defense for a couple decades. Good news: they seem to have recognized this and invested in recapitalizing their industrial defense base.
- anovikov 2y agoStupid question - why not just protect cables with anchored mines? Of course, publicly declaring the minefields.
- pmontra 2y agoFor all the length of the cable? Anyway, ships must let have routes to pass over those cables or we would partition the seas into small patches. Any ship passing over a cable between two mines can cut it. Edit: or do you mean mines anchored to the cable on the sea floor? That would make it easier to kaboom the cable instead of cutting it.
- epoxy_sauce 2y agoSeems like a massive hazard if a natural thing severs a cable and requires maintenance. Plus the removal at some point, presumably. Would suck for true accidents to have human lives on top of the damage. I imagine there must be some other deterrent measure but drawing a blank. My brother was the navy man...
- jeroenhd 2y agoLaying a mine field across the whole length of major waterways probably isn't a very good idea. Plus, maintaining a mine field and preventing innocent deaths would probably cost more than the inconvenience and monetary damages of repairing the broken cables.
- pjc50 2y agoThe Baltic sea is full of civilian traffic!
- 0_____0 2y ago[flagged]
- grayhatter 2y agoYou seem to have the mistaken impression that booby traps aren't horribly problematic. Would you advocate the border control should point guns at anyone who crosses the border? Or is that a needless risk to the safety of humans? I'd ask you to consider for a moment, exactly what is going to happen to that mine? I assume you thought it would damage or destroy any anchor dragged across the cable? Well it's really hard to predict how much damage it would cause but lets assume it works exactly as you hope and say it only destroys the anchor chain of the boat. What if there's a storm, and that ship can't anchor safely, but because it's run by incompetent, or evil people they don't care, and try to park near another ship crash into it. Both ships sink and a bunch of innocent people on the ship that just happened to park in the wrong place, die. That's assuming all the people on the "evil ship" were involved and weren't just hired to work delivering cargo. You admitted it was a stupid question, but I'd like to suggest you should avoid defaulting to suggesting death and destruction. A better stupid question would be "why can't we armor the cables" instead of "why can't we hurt other people"
- ruahdG 2y ago[flagged]
- snozolli 2y agoThe world is tired of it. No, the world seems pretty committed to backing Ukraine in its defense against an invader. Only Putin, his puppets, and their useful idiots who consume Putin's propaganda seem to be "tired of it".
- dralley 2y agoEvery thread tangentially about Russia gets a couple of these brand new accounts with uninformly pro-Russian comments. Usually it's the only comment they ever make. Congrats on being one of today's few.
- siliconc0w 2y agoEasy solution- seize any tanker coming from a Russian port. Revoke all insurance or bullshit maritime chicanery that allows hiding the beneficial owner. Why even have sanctions if you don't enforce them.
- qwertox 2y agoIf I were a bad actor, I would position a sub at some location over a cable, sabotage the cable at a far away point, and while the cable is unusable, I'd install some kind of splitter. Then again, I'd probably have nowhere to collect the data to.
- knowitnone 2y agoI mean, they can ban ships from certain nations from entering - sink them if they do.