CAUSES OF CABLE DAMAGE HARD TO PINPOINT
Security sources say the Chinese bulk carrier Yi Peng 3, which left the Russian port of Ust-Luga on Nov 15, was responsible for severing the two undersea cables in Swedish economic waters between Nov 17 and 18 by dragging its anchor on the seabed.
As of Monday, it was stationary in Danish economic waters, being watched by NATO members’ naval ships, having been urged by Sweden to return to be investigated. Some politicians had accused it of sabotage, but no authority had shown evidence that its actions were deliberate.
China has said it is ready to assist in the investigation, while its ally Russia has denied involvement in any of the Baltic infrastructure incidents.
The case is similar to an incident last year when the Chinese ship NewNew Polar Bear damaged two cables linking Estonia to Finland and Sweden as well as an Estonia-Finland gas pipeline. China made similar promises to assist, but the ship was not stopped and, a year on, Finnish and Estonian investigators have yet to present conclusions.
Damage to cables is not new. Globally, around 150 are damaged each year, according to the UK-based International Cable Protection Committee. The telecoms cables, power lines and gas pipes in the shallow Baltic are particularly vulnerable due to its very intense ship traffic, the US-based telecom research firm TeleGeography said.
If any of the recent incidents are proven to be sabotage by another country, it would mark a return of a type of warfare not seen for decades.
“You should go back to World War One or the American-Spanish war to find a state-sponsored sabotage of a submarine cable,” said Paul Brodsky, a senior researcher at TeleGeography.
To counter this potential threat, NATO in May opened its Maritime Centre for Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure (CUI) in London, which wants to map all critical infrastructure in NATO-controlled waters and identify weak spots.
In Rostock, on Germany’s Baltic coast, a multinational naval headquarters opened in October to protect NATO members’ interests in the sea.
“What I think we can achieve is to place the responsibility after an incident,” CUI’s Branch Head, Commander Pal Bratbak, said onboard the Weilheim, stressing the growing power of technology.
NATO’s Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation in Italy is launching software that will combine private and military data and imagery from hydrophones, radars, satellites, vessels’ Automatic Identification System (AIS) and fibres with Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), which private telecom companies use to localise cuts in their cables.
“If we have a good picture of what’s going on, then we can deploy units to verify what the system tells us,” Bratbak said.
German Lieutenant-General Hans-Werner Wiermann, who led an undersea infrastructure coordination cell at NATO Headquarters until March, said no pipeline or cable can be guarded all the time.
“The right response to such hybrid attacks is resilience,” he said, adding that companies were already laying cables to add “redundancies” – spare routings that will allow critical pieces of infrastructure to keep working if one cable is cut.
Onboard the Weilheim, Król’s second drone is finally able to brave the storm to continue the inspection drill underwater.
