Commentary
Responding to the latest spate of cutting undersea cables believed to be linked to Russian and Chinese sabotage, NATO on Jan. 14 met with the Baltic states and announced a new mission called Baltic Sentry. Frigates, maritime patrol aircraft, and a fleet of naval drones are to provide enhanced surveillance and deterrence. However worthy the initiative, catching the offenders will not be easy.
A combination of skill and serendipity came together on Christmas Day 2024 when the Finnish navy
caught the Eagle S, a dilapidated oil tanker registered in the Cook Islands, in the act. Its anchor has been retrieved, with a 62-mile-long trail found carved into the seabed leading to it, and eight crew members were forbidden to leave Finland pending investigation.
The ship is believed to be part of a shadow fleet of vessels that carry Russian crude oil and petroleum products that have been embargoed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
What makes the Eagle S case unusual is that, in most cases, the damage to the cables will not be discovered until the perpetrator has already left the area. The issue of who was responsible for the series of explosions and leaks that rendered the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline inoperable in 2022 remains unresolved. Russia is known to have mapped vital Western infrastructure for energy and the internet.
In an incident in 2023, the Hong Kong-registered Newnew Polar Bear containership was accused of damaging the Baltic Connector natural-gas pipeline and data cables by dragging its anchor along the seabed in the Gulf of Finland, then immediately leaving for China without being investigated.
As Finland’s Minister of European Affairs Anders Adlercreuz
remarked with irony, it was hard to believe that any sea captain would not notice that his vessel was dragging a 13,228-pound anchor behind it “for hundreds of kilometers.” The anchor was discovered a few meters from the site of the damage.
As to whether the action had been approved by Beijing, the minister added that if he, as a captain, did something the Chinese regime hadn’t approved of, he would be concerned about returning his boat to China.
In a subsequent incident, a Chinese vessel cut two fiber-optic data cables with Beijing delaying permission for European investigators to board the ship, eventually letting them do so only if accompanied by Chinese officials.
The Baltic Sentry
initiative currently involves only the eight countries bordering the Baltic Sea. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is, however, aware that the vulnerability is worldwide, and hence, other states must be involved as well. Indeed, these occurrences can be regarded as a modern-day variant of state-sponsored piracy and a form of hybrid warfare capable of doing a great deal of damage without the use of kinetic means.
The potential damage is huge: more than 95 percent of internet traffic is secured via undersea cables, and 808,000 miles of cables transmit an estimated $10 trillion worth of financial transactions daily. While traffic can be redirected and pipelines repaired, the process is cumbersome and can cost millions of dollars.
In the 2023 case, Gasgrid Finland and Estonian gas system operator Elering were forced to shut down operations, disconnecting a crucial link between the Nordic and Baltic gas markets for several months. Six months later, after several million-dollar repairs, the connection was
reopened.
Although both China and Russia have denied being involved, ships from both countries were noticed crisscrossing the locations prior to the damage, creating at least the appearance of a cause-effect relationship. A review of Chinese-language patent applications by the American magazine Newsweek revealed that engineers in China have invented devices for severing cables quickly and inexpensively.
To explain that such a device was needed in order to remove illegal cables from China, a Norwegian expert who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue termed them “absurd because the method was random and could also lead to damage to useful cables.”Questioned about the allegations, Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington,
responded that China’s “principled position on submarine cables” was to “jointly protect [them] and work together to build a community with a shared future in cyberspace.”
Taiwan, under heavy and increasing pressure to unify with communist China, which more than 90 percent of its citizens have indicated they are opposed to, is a frequent target. In 2023, within days of each other, two undersea internet cables to Taiwan’s outlying island of Matsu/Mazu were cut, one by a Chinese fishing boat and the second by a Chinese cargo vessel, causing concern that this was a warning to Taiwan authorities of the country’s vulnerability. Although service was rerouted, even the temporary disruption to the island’s fishing industry was costly, since customers could not place orders for their highly perishable commodity. More ominously, experts
assessed that the disruption had already furnished Beijing with invaluable intelligence.
As 2025 began, the Taiwan coast guard
discovered the Cameroon-flagged but Chinese-owned cargo vessel—then known as Shunxing 39—dragging its anchor over an international subsea cable northeast of the country. Its automatic identification system signal, which is used to broadcast a ship’s location, had been turned off. Whether rough seas or an abundance of caution prevented Taiwan coast guard personnel from boarding, the ship was able to continue to Busan, South Korea.
While cables are sometimes severed accidentally, this latest incident was highly unlikely to have been.
According to the deputy head of Taiwan’s digital ministry, a ship would need to accidentally drop its anchor on the cable, then accidentally turn on its engine with the anchor down, and even if it realized the anchor was down, it would have kept the engine moving until the cable was cut. The Shunxing 39 had operated for the past six months under at least two names, two different flags, and six different identification numbers.
Apart from close vigilance, it is not clear what can be done. Under international maritime rules—unless the ship is within a nation’s territorial waters and the damage also occurs in the territorial waters—a country’s options are essentially limited to protests, in which case the putative offender is likely to deny any involvement. Changing international laws to allow for boarding in international waters would be difficult in any circumstances, but all the more so since the two major perpetrators hold veto power in the United Nations Security Council. Moreover, cables can also be cut by uncrewed submarines. Taiwan is reportedly considering backup alternatives ranging from low-Earth orbit satellites to microwaves.
Even if all submarine cables could be secured, the infrastructure is not secure. In a January 2025 interview with the television program “60 Minutes,” outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray, after terming China as the defining threat of our generation, stated that the regime had
infiltrated America’s critical infrastructure, including pipelines, and prepositioned itself to act against water treatment, transportation systems, the electricity grid, and telecommunications, lying in wait until it chooses to act.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
