Sabotage of Subsea Cables

Have you heard about the sabotage of multiple subsea cables in the Baltic over the last week or so? Me, neither. At the ASPI’s The Strategist Mercedes Page tells the story:

On the night of 7 October, the 77-kilometre Balticconnector gas pipeline and a separate but close-by subsea telecommunications cable stretching between Finland and Estonia were damaged in the Gulf of Finland. A week later, it emerged that, on the same night, another subsea telecommunications cable—connecting Estonia and Sweden—had also been damaged.

That might not seem particularly newsworthy. After all, subsea cables—despite facilitating around 95% of internet traffic, making them the physical backbone of our digital world—are notoriously vulnerable to damage. These fibre optic cables, often only the diameter of a garden hose, along with gas pipelines, zigzag all across the ocean floor, where they can suffer damage from storms, marine life, waves, earthquakes and accidental maritime vehicle activity. There are hundreds of such incidents each year.

This case, however, appears to have been no accident.

Finland, Estonia and Sweden soon announced that the gas pipeline and cables had likely been deliberately damaged and were being investigated as related incidents.

Read the whole thing. I don’t know what to make of it but it certainly doesn’t sound good.