Cables deep under the Baltic Sea keep getting damaged – here is what Nato is doing to protect them
A French Navy surveillance plane, equipped with a powerful camera, meticulously scans the Baltic Sea, zooming in on cargo ships and scrutinising details like deck activity and chimney smoke.
The Atlantique 2 aircraft, part of a new Nato mission, spent more than five hours patrolling the vast expanse from Germany to Estonia, its sensors gathering crucial data.
This heightened surveillance, both in the air and at sea, signals Nato’s intensified efforts to protect underwater infrastructure in the Baltic. The alliance is responding to a concerning rise in incidents involving damage to vital energy and data cables and pipelines.
The new mission, “Baltic Sentry,” aims to deter and prevent future sabotage attempts.
Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte emphasised the alliance’s resolve, stating, “We will do everything in our power to make sure that we fight back, that we are able to see what is happening and then take the next steps to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. And our adversaries should know this.”
The message is clear: Nato is committed to safeguarding the economic interests of the Baltic region by protecting its critical underwater infrastructure.
Power and communications cables and gas pipelines stitch together the nine countries with shores on the Baltic, a relatively shallow and nearly landlocked sea.
A few examples are the 94-mile Balticconnector pipeline that carries gas between Finland and Estonia, the high-voltage Baltic Cable connecting the power grids of Sweden and Germany, and the 729-mile C-Lion1 telecommunications cable between Finland and Germany.
Undersea pipes and cables help power economies, keep houses warm and connect billions of people. More than 807,800 miles of fibre optic cables — more than enough to stretch to the moon and back — span the world’s oceans and seas, according to TeleGeography, which tracks and maps the vital communication networks. The cables are typically the width of a garden hose.
But 97 per cent of the world’s communications, including trillions of pounds of financial transactions, pass through them each day.
“In the last two months alone, we have seen damage to a cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden, another connecting Germany and Finland, and most recently, a number of cables linking Estonia and Finland. Investigations of all of these cases are still ongoing. But there is reason for grave concern,” Rutte said on 14 January.
At least 11 Baltic cables have been damaged since October 2023 — the most recent being a fibre optic cable connecting Latvia and the Swedish island of Gotland, reported to have ruptured on Sunday. Although cable operators note that subsea cable damage is commonplace, the frequency and concentration of incidents in the Baltic heightened suspicions that damage might have been deliberate.
There also are fears that Russia could target cables as part of a wider campaign of so-called “hybrid warfare” to destabilise European nations helping Ukraine defend itself against the full-scale invasion that Moscow has been pursuing since 2022.
Without specifically blaming Russia, Rutte said: “Hybrid means sabotage. Hybrid means cyber-attacks. Hybrid means sometimes even assassination attacks, attempts, and in this case, it means hitting on our critical undersea infrastructure.”
