NATO Takes Action to Protect Undersea Infrastructure as Senior Russian Leader Says They’re Fair Game

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg delivers remarks to journalists as he arrives at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, on June 15, 2023 during a two-day meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NAC). Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP via Getty Images

NATO on Friday said it is taking action to protect undersea pipelines and cables, in what appears to be a response to a senior Russian leader’s recent remarks that it would be fair for Russia to cut off undersea communications of its enemies.

Speaking at a press conference held at the military alliance’s Brussels headquarter, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Russia has “the capacity to map, but also potentially to conduct actions against critical infrastructure” off the coast of Europe.

“This is about gas pipelines, oil pipelines, but not least thousands of kilometers of internet cables, which is so critical for our modern societies—for financial transaction, for communications,” he added. “This is in the North Sea, in the Baltic Sea, but [also] across the whole Atlantic, the Mediterranean Sea.”

To address the threat, Stoltenberg said, NATO is establishing a new command center tasked to monitor threats and attacks on undersea infrastructure in NATO waters. The center will be opened in Northwood, a suburb of London.

“There’s no way that we can have NATO presence alone [on] all these thousands of kilometers of undersea, offshore infrastructure. But we can be better at collecting information, intelligence, sharing information, connecting the dots, because also in the private sector is a lot of information.”

Nord Stream Sabotage

Friday’s announcement came two days after Dimitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, blamed Western countries for the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, saying that there’s no reason for Russia to not do the same in retaliation.

“Now that the Western countries’ complicity in the sabotage of the Nord Streams has been proven, there should be no constraints, even moral ones, on us to prevent us from destroying our enemies’ seabed communications cables,” Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel, reported state news agency TASS.

No one has yet to take responsibility for last September’s attacks against the multi-billion-dollar underwater pipelines carrying natural gas from Russia to Germany. But Russia was quick to point the finger at the United States and its allies.

“Sanctions are not enough for the West, they have switched to sabotage. Unbelievable, but it is a fact!” Putin said days after the explosions during a speech at the Kremlin celebrating the annexation of four regions of eastern Ukraine. “By organizing explosions on the Nord Stream international gas pipelines that run along the bottom of the Baltic Sea they actually started destroying European energy infrastructure.”

Gas bubbles from the Nord Stream 2 leak reaching the surface of the Baltic Sea in the area show a disturbance of well over one kilometer in diameter near Bornholm, Denmark, on Sept. 27, 2022. Danish Defence Command/Handout via Reuters

The United States has denied involvement in the pipeline attacks, although Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged the incident presents a “tremendous opportunity” for European countries to quit Russian gas altogether.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs,” Blinken said. “That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come.”

Those who speculate that the attack was the United States’ work also cited President Joe Biden’s remark just before Russia launched its full-scale military assault on Ukraine. Speaking alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Biden claimed there would not be a Nord Stream 2 if war were to break out.

“If Russia invades—that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again ... there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it,” he said, adding, “I promise you, we'll be able to do it.”

In February, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published on his blog an article saying that the attack was carried out by U.S. Navy divers in a Biden-authorized operation. Hersh, who is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting that exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, said his source has “direct knowledge of the operational planning.”

The White House has dismissed such claims, calling them “utterly false and complete fiction.”

More recently, in March, the New York Times and German newspaper Die Zeit reported that U.S. and European intelligence officials obtained tentative intelligence to suggest a pro-Ukrainian saboteur group could have been behind the attack on the pipelines.

German investigators, according to Die Zeit, believe that a group of five men and one woman carried out the undersea bombings, using a yacht from a Poland-based company owned by Ukrainian citizens. All six were understood to have used forged passports to hide their real identities. The German outlet also reported that intelligence indicates that a pro-Ukrainian group might be responsible for the attack, but German authorities have not yet found any evidence.