> It then carried on across four undersea fibreoptic cables, three of which registered failures around the time the ship crossed them. The ship was suspected by Finnish authorities of having dragged its anchor to damage the cables and was escorted into custody.
The ship in this case was the Eagle S, estimated to be costing the owner €14,500 per day in running costs while impounded.[0] If the owners abandon the ship, that's a ~$30m asset forfeited, which could be used to compensate the cable owner for the damage.
How much does it cost to fix a broken cable? Here's one estimate saying $2m[1].
Monitoring cable breaks + rapid reaction + police investigation + asset seizure + criminal prosecution = increases the cost of this attack.
The problem with that math is that you can't catch them all. Russia has been gauging Europe's response by attacking cables close by, but there's no reason to believe they won't strike other strategic targets that are harder to monitor in future.
The current approach, to zig-zag over a cable with the anchor, is extremely obvious, but they could just as well have an entire fleet of ships just casually drag their anchor when passing over their targeted cable until one of them catches it. With a bit of planning, a large number of unrelated ships could be over one or more cables at the time the cable snaps, making it rather difficult (and therefore expensive) to figure out which ship is behind the attack.
The value of their crude oil fleet is also rather diminished by sanctions now that they can't sell as much crude oil as they could before.
For this specific attack, the ship being forfeited would be a net win. However, for the many other sabotaged cables, that's not happening. I think Russia gladly pays a couple thousand euros a day to sabotage European communications for weeks, as well as trick European/NATO fleets to show themselves and demonstrate how they behave when they're looking for trouble.
1) Rapid identification and localization of breaks, so military/police forces can be dispatched to the area.
2) Continuous deployment of MQ-9B SeaGuardian or HALE UAV platforms around shallow cable runs to locate and id dark ships, who would also be running nav beacons before and after.
3) Low-earth-orbit persistent sensing networks (e.g. what's now called PWSA [0]) with ship id'ing sensor packages.
As parent notes though, the lynchpin of this is inverting the cost:benefit ratio to be unfavorable, by raising the likelihood that ships will be detained and ultimately seized.
Oligarchs are not suffering much tho. For them it's no new yacht this year type of thing. They have golden visas and property in nice countries. Plan b is not going anywhere, countries love corrupt money and because US is giving up its influence lately they have even less external motivation to overthrow egomaniac in power. But if world was strict on sanctions workarounds and if US maintained a hard line I think it could change.
I wish, but Soon has been the mantra since the invasion started. We're literally buying more oil and gas from Russia than arming and funding Ukraine[1]. We're buying more this year than last year.
Europe's response has been and continues to be nothing less than shambolic and shameful.
Yes, some Russian oil still makes its way to Europe, often through indirect routes. In 2023, the EU imported 130 million barrels of refined products from refineries processing Russian crude, adding about €1.1 billion in tax revenue to Russia (https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/fossil-gas/eu-pur...). The EU is working to close these loopholes.
The claim that Europe is buying more from Russia than it’s giving Ukraine ignores the scale of military aid and the long-term shift away from Russian energy. It’s not perfect, but it’s far from "shambolic."
They are not. The owner doesn’t want to bear the running costs (and possibly also other ongoing consequences), so they’ve threatened to abandon the ship. Separately, the cable owner has initiated litigation that could see the ship seized to pay damages.
They don't need to sail through territorial waters. The Baltic is a shallow sea (~55m deep on average, 460m at the deepest point) and an anchor chain can be 200-300m long. So dragging an anchor on the bottom of shallow international waters provides just the right combination of plausible deniability and an environment with low legal repercussions.
This is one of the reasons it doesn't happen in the Atlantic. By the time you are out of territorial waters, in general the required anchor chain length puts the incident outside of any plausible deniability.
But what kind of inspection and registration prevent a ship from minding its own business in any Baltic port, say Sankt Petersburg, and then just drag an anchor across some of the cables on its way out or to any other Baltic port?
The whole thing with this kind of sabotage is that looks like a ship doing ship things except with a "defective" anchor system, "oops".
If the headline is a serious question, it'd be helpful to have an #incidents/year chart in here somewhere. The article includes "According to the Recorded Future analyst Matt Mooney, between 100 and 200 cable outages occur every year" but it is easy to miss if someone doesn't go looking for the statistic.
Accidental cable cuts happen all the time, but there is clear proof of intentional sabotage for some of the recent cuts.
I believe this is akin to the US flying obvious spy planes over countries at altitudes they can't stop them at even if they wanted to: a show of force, likely unrelated to how a full-on military conflict would work.
If Russia wanted to make these attacks look like an accident, they could've sent fishing ships or at least pick more believable anchor points.
And the next line says: " Yet, Mooney said the pattern associated with the cable fault events that have occurred in the Baltic Sea in the past 15 months makes it unlikely that none of them were intentional."
Intentional can mean a lot of things. Some plane crashes are caused by suicidal pilots. I'm sure there is the occasional captain or crew member who just goes postal and decides to take his anger out on infrastructure.
This sounds like a situation where even if it is deliberate enemy action the appropriate thing to do is ask them to stop. Maybe invite the Chinese diplomats in, tell them to stop, then expel the embassy for a week and then allocate some extra budget to cable repairs.
If we're talking about - and I quote the article - a "sabotage campaign aimed at destabilising Nato allies" then it'd look more like the Nord Stream explosions; big showy events where the US looks so suspicious that we can almost dismiss their involvement because that'd be too obvious. Random cable cutting is a bit too weird in that it doesn't sound like it achieves anything and seems too subtle an attack to have a motive.
> That's funny; they obviously don't have any strategists.
They obviously do; they're the folks who, after a few weeks flatfooted, got the Harris campaign to drop stuff that was resonating like the "weird" thing in exchange for "we've got the Cheneys on our side!"
Destroying NS seemed significant at the time but not anymore - we've drastically reduced dependency on Russian gas so it makes no sense to build/open new infra for that. And even if the war ends, Europeans will be ware of sending their money to a country that may use it against them.
It depends on who wins the war and on which terms. Examples: after a surrender you better have to buy anything from the winner at the price made by the winner. After a stalemate you buy somewhere else.
> This sounds like a situation where even if it is deliberate enemy action the appropriate thing to do is ask them to stop. Maybe invite the Chinese diplomats in, tell them to stop, then expel the embassy for a week and then allocate some extra budget to cable repairs.
LOL. This is hilarious. Its kind of like someone who has never experienced gang warfare stepping into an inner city turf asking opposite sides to take their grievance to cops.
Yet NS was done by Ukrainian ragtag group (unless there is some new development that I missed on the case), well within the rules of war, not that anybody actually cares about them anymore. And its destruction was a good strategic move for whole Europe, otherwise Germany would be dragging their feet forever. We're happy to do business with almost anybody but if some state keeps stating how it will wipe us out with nukes then no, you don't deserve our money and go f*ck yourself.
Throwing away diplomats for a week, not sure what that would cause, probably 'meh' and continuing if the effort is intentional. Its not like diplomats actually make any serious decisions, they just parrot official policies.
Seymour Hersh published a detailed piece outlining his case that it was carried out by the US military with assistance from Norway (who have expertise in that part of the seabed), using the cover of a NATO naval exercise as partial cover:
I find it more credible that these were the actors involved. Biden wanted to end a future link between Germany and Russia. In Germany there is significant segment of the population that is distrustful of the US (even before the recent Trump shenanigans) and the potential stronger infrastructure ties to Russia. I find it more credible than a ragtag group of Ukrainians did it personally.
In 2023 - a full year into the war - Hersh asserted "the Russians have yet to put any of their main forces" into Ukraine (https://twitter.com/JimmySecUK/status/1628898816953909251). He's carried water for the Syrian regime repeatedly; the Nordstream report was pretty widely debunked by available open source intelligence. He's not super credible these days.
Hersh never provided ANY evidence and the german investigation is pretty conclusive that it was done by Ukrainians. Which is pretty understandable since the main and openly stated purpose of NS was always to circumvent Ukraine. That might be ok in peace time but when at war and your enemy tries to freeze you to death, things look differently.
"85% of Americans and 77% of Germans see the relationship between their countries as good. This is consistent with recent years, though prior to President Joe Biden’s election in 2020, German views of the relationship were much more negative."
It was as high as 82% positive in 2022. During Trump's first term it was much lower but Trump is an outlier.
I'm Finnish. I don't recall ever hearing about a cable being cut in the Baltic Sea before 2022, and based on quick Googling, cannot find any reports of such incidents either. And now they occur several times per year. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
The finnish security police themselves have said that these cuts happen about 200 times every year without any suspicion of sabotage.
My personal opinion so far is that this whole thing is teetering between media frenzy and actual issue.
Edit: Have to correct myself. Googling now it seems all traces of this statement have been scrubbed, and instead I find that the International Cable Protection Committe (ICPC) claim about 200 cable issues a year WORLD WIDE.
So maybe the Finnish security police had misspoken and have now retracted this statement from all media.
Either way, I have worked with internet since 2004 and I remember as early as 2004 dealing with companies in Sweden who had boats and other equipment just to install and maintain cables across the baltic and atlantic. It's something that requires non-stop maintenance, regardless of the security situation in the world.
One also has to ask if it's productive to cut these cables when 1) it disrupts nothing on a grand scale, and 2) if it were to disrupt anything it also means they cannot perform other attacks.
> One also has to ask if it's productive to cut these cables when 1) it disrupts nothing on a grand scale, and 2) if it were to disrupt anything it also means they cannot perform other attacks.
Part of a balanced DoS.
The article is about cables but Russia has also been jamming satellite beams and shelling ground stations since the start of the Ukraine conflict, and they (IIRC) even developed a missile with a nuclear payload to take out satellites kinetically.
> I'm Finnish. I don't recall ever hearing about a cable being cut in the Baltic Sea before 2022
I'm Swedish, if that matters, and recall reading about (accidental) cable breakages all the way back to at least 2010 sometime. As mentioned elsewhere, there are between 100-200 cable breakages annually
> Do cables break?
> Yes! Cable faults are common. On average, there are over 100 each year.
> Unintentional damage from fishing vessels and ships dragging anchors account for two-thirds of all cable faults.
It seems like the media have ramped up reporting on cable breaks, because of the context, but seemingly none of them have been confirmed to be intentional, at least as far as I know. But I agree that it seems highly suspicious, also the recent water-supply sabotage on Gotland seems related to this all (https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/Vz2em4/misstankt-sabota...)
I meant to comment that I doubt the Baltic Sea sees on the order of 1% of world's total shipping tonnage, but actually it seems that is roughly the correct figure.
The Bornholm Cable seems to have been cut several times in the 2000s, but I can't find anything about any other breakages before 2022.
There's an obvious selection effect, yes. But it is interesting that no news or technical reports or anything can be found about any earlier breakages.
NATO sent a flotilla of ships to patrol the Baltic off Finland, in response to damage to undersea cables. One would hope (!) that was based on a genuine problem existing an not just a media-driven misrepresentation of normal levels of cable damage.
Europe doesn't want an armed conflict with Russia. Even if Europe would be willing to sacrifice as many people in a conflict as Russia has, they'd still be up against a megalomaniac dictator with nukes. Real victory in a traditional war against Russia is unattainable. Same with China, or the US, or possibly India; the people in power are willing to look crazy enough to choose nuclear armageddon as a last resort.
And it's not like Europe isn't fighting back. European intelligence has been deep inside Russian networks since before the first invasion of Ukraine. From the European side, the invasion of Ukraine is a proxy war, with billions of euros spent on fighting Russia, while to Russia the war is a normal invasion with Russian (and now North Korean) troops on the ground.
The way Europe (except for Ukraine, of course) is fighting Russia mostly benefits Europe, as far as I can tell. Most of Europe's losses, so far, have been economical. Switching to a war economy to defend against Russia would probably cost more and be less effective. Until Ukraine falls, I don't see why Europe would want to change that deal.
>Real victory in a traditional war against Russia is unattainable.
This is very wrong. Anything is possible, it's just a matter of political will.
The most likely scenario is russia is pushed to the brink and collapses internally like 1917 and 1990. Then Russia balkanizes along ethnic lines, like 1917 and 1990.
Unfortunately Russia didn’t balkanize in 1990. The largest Soviet republic became the Russian Federation and kept its borders.
The world today would be a much safer place if 1990 Russia had split into about six independent states, each comparable to Kazakhstan or Ukraine. Hopefully that will eventually happen when Putin is gone. Imperial Russia should cease to exist like imperial Austria did. It has been a great source of misery throughout the centuries.
The republics that gained independence broke free from the Russian empire. Several wars also broke out as a result including transnistria, Georgia and Chechnya.
Western Europe still has a massive manpower advantage, before you even look at investment and . If things develop to the level where the "comfortable city dwellers" in Europe is truly threatened I don't see Russia as being anywhere near the victor (though you're correct that in that case there won't be a "victor" so much "Might Lose A Little Less"). But the goal is to push up to that limit but no beyond, at least for now.
I don't think many people are actually nationalistic zealots who want to eliminate other countries so long as theirs is technically still existent, as even a king of ashes won't have a great life compared to a mid-range billionaire today.
That is a nice slogan but the “everything” is an estimated 5 billion deaths globally as direct and indirect result of a large scale nuclear exchange between Russia and “The West”. Putin is going to get old and die and Russia will likely look very different in 50, 100, 250 years. Other than the permanent enslavement of the human race, I can’t see any goal worth destroying all of human civilization and killing the majority of the people on the planet.
> And it's not like Europe isn't fighting back. European intelligence has been deep inside Russian networks since before the first invasion of Ukraine. From the European side, the invasion of Ukraine is a proxy war, with billions of euros spent on fighting Russia, while to Russia the war is a normal invasion with Russian (and now North Korean) troops on the ground.
This is flatly wrong and gives far too much credit to Europe. The US had to shake Europe and Ukraine awake to the impending invasion of Ukraine. And I say this as an EU citizen.
The EU just announced a series of financial measures designed to support a massive level of re-armament by member states.
I don't think we are in denial. Whether we can effectively respond is a different question.
Rearmament is stupid. For every $1 spent destroying Russian equipment it's equivalent to $10 not spent on deterrence over the next 10 years. The only thing more expensive than a war is an arms race.
It's also a way to subsidize your own country by subsidizing the arms industry. Pretty much what has happened in the US in the past years (pretty much all "gifts" are subsidies of the arms industry).
???
I'm suggesting europe take the 800 billion they're going to spend on deterrence and instead buy weapons for Ukraine today. This would degrade russias military sufficient to need to spend less on deterrence in the future. In no way is this supportive of russia.
As an example: If europe gave Ukraine enough cruise missiles to wipe out russias Tu 95 fleet that would be a permanent loss. They were built by the Soviet Union and rebuilding them would take a hundred years at least.
What europe fails to see is the massive ROI from supporting Ukraine today.
Deterrence is usually the reason why a category of nation-state aggression doesn't exist. Otherwise, the fact that we've never had a global nuclear war would be sufficient to prove that we don't need to deter a global nuclear war.
I agree somewhat but this is also aimed at independence from the US. The US has shown itself to be an unreliable ally that can get you in a dangerous position and then leave you hanging.
So much of that money is going to close the capability gaps.
If I were a bad actor, I would position a sub at some location over a cable, sabotage the cable at a far away point, and while the cable is unusable, I'd install some kind of splitter. Then again, I'd probably have nowhere to collect the data to.
Laying a mine field across the whole length of major waterways probably isn't a very good idea. Plus, maintaining a mine field and preventing innocent deaths would probably cost more than the inconvenience and monetary damages of repairing the broken cables.
You seem to have the mistaken impression that booby traps aren't horribly problematic.
Would you advocate the border control should point guns at anyone who crosses the border? Or is that a needless risk to the safety of humans?
I'd ask you to consider for a moment, exactly what is going to happen to that mine? I assume you thought it would damage or destroy any anchor dragged across the cable? Well it's really hard to predict how much damage it would cause but lets assume it works exactly as you hope and say it only destroys the anchor chain of the boat. What if there's a storm, and that ship can't anchor safely, but because it's run by incompetent, or evil people they don't care, and try to park near another ship crash into it. Both ships sink and a bunch of innocent people on the ship that just happened to park in the wrong place, die. That's assuming all the people on the "evil ship" were involved and weren't just hired to work delivering cargo.
You admitted it was a stupid question, but I'd like to suggest you should avoid defaulting to suggesting death and destruction. A better stupid question would be "why can't we armor the cables" instead of "why can't we hurt other people"
A mine can't harm the anchor, but to drag the anchor, the ship must cross the minefield first.
What's going to happen? The ship will sink. In practice, that will either force Russians to sweep the mines thus attracting too much attention, or to give up on this idea of damaging cables.
It doesn't matter if people are directly involved. When a bunch of crews will die... well nothing will happen because for shipowners they are entirely disposable. But loss of ships will prompt shipowners to be extra careful to where the take orders from.
Why would anyone in their right mind run their ship into a bridge, or run it aground navigating a canal? Mistakes, misjudgments, or just confusion happen and killing innocent people because some equipment might be damaged by a hostile actor seems closer to a war crime than a reasonable policy.
Do you understand that by their very nature, underwater cables have to span the width of a body of water? What are you going to do, draw a line of mines from Denmark to Sweden?
Make passageways or even deactivate mines using signal from the same cable it is safeguarding. Ship needs to pass, captain sends an SMS from a sat and the mine is deactivated for half an hour. If ship is suspicious, a destroyer escorts at at gunpoint - cable signal lost, torpedo goes off automatically.
Great idea. I was thinking of something similar after 9/11. Install explosives on all commercial airliners and have them automatically detonate and destroy the plane if it gets too close to a building where it isn't supposed to be. It's foolproof!
For all the length of the cable? Anyway, ships must let have routes to pass over those cables or we would partition the seas into small patches. Any ship passing over a cable between two mines can cut it.
Edit: or do you mean mines anchored to the cable on the sea floor? That would make it easier to kaboom the cable instead of cutting it.
Seems like a massive hazard if a natural thing severs a cable and requires maintenance. Plus the removal at some point, presumably. Would suck for true accidents to have human lives on top of the damage.
I imagine there must be some other deterrent measure but drawing a blank. My brother was the navy man...
Do you know how long these cables are? How many subs do you think you would need? Actually, surface ships would probably be more effective, but you would still need infeasible numbers of them.
Good thinking, which doesn't make the size of the Baltic Sea comparable to the size of a city, nor the costs of a fleet of cars with a single driver comparable to the costs of a fleet of ships with full crews.
It's tempting to say "if it's such a problem why don't they just monitor better?", but the ocean is vast.
I would think offering rewards for information could be a good deterrent.
It takes a decent amount of coordination, equipment, and crew to pull off these missions.
I imagine many people on these ships aren’t getting paid that great.
By offering levels of rewards for information about what organizations are being used to funnel money and equipment into this, it might help bring some level of prosecution, as well as make the missions more difficult to operate as there will be a lot less trust.
> It takes a decent amount of coordination, equipment, and crew to pull off these missions.
They're dragging anchors on the marine floor; all coordination, equipment and crew are already there as a medium-sized fishing vessel is perfectly sufficient for this job.
Submarines aren't really well suited for this. You want something that can search and monitor over a wide area, and then the ability to intercept and potentially search/seize a suspicious vessel. The primary attribute of submarines is stealth, which is not relevant here.
What you want is a combination of maritime patrol aircraft and offshore patrol craft. Maritime patrol aircraft (helicopter, fixed wing aircraft, UAVs) are equipped with surface search radar and other sensors that enable them to monitor a wide area. The patrol craft are also fitted with radars and sensors, and can also move to intercept a suspicious ship. A helicopter could also potentially be used for intercept
I refuse to believe that AIS is the only way ships are being tracked. I think it's probably more likely that nobody is using their military intelligence to track fishing boats.
There's over 100k merchant sea vessels, and that does not include ships that nominally aren't supposed to be on high seas either. It's simply infeasible to do so, unless you're stacking high definition cameras with high precision accuracy control onto Starlink satellites.
Nope. Also you don't want one of these anchors be anywhere near a submarine.
We cannot prevent it, we can only detect it and (try to) identify who did it. The planet (some special interest areas) are constantly being monitored (satellites, surveillance drones) and when large ships are not being 'naughty' (switch of transponders) it's relatively easy to put two and two together.
As a side-note, Russia's playbook it to cause small and frequent sabotage(s). Small enough to not cause massive retaliation (i.e. it forces someone to destroy their railroad infra by causing thousands of derailments within one hour), and frequent enough to cause actual damage.
Basically Russia's tactic is to spread FUD, but in the real world.
Small sabotage attempts at water towers, power plants etc. Nothing actually happens but it gets in the news and people think something COULD have happened.
It keeps people stressed a bit all the time and they start wanting things to go back to "normal" at any cost - even by letting Russia keep the bits of Ukraine they assaulted.
I wonder if any EU nation has put together a maritime warning system based on multiple inputs like transponder signals and satellite/UAV imagery. Except for imagery interpretation it wouldn’t even need AI, just check for anomalies like a ship off course or turning off its transponder.
Because the US has a pretty sizable naval fleet of the US Navy plus US Coast Guard, extensive surveillance capabilities due to the "war on drugs", the jurisdiction and responsibilities are relatively clear, and outside of the 12-mile zone the cables simply are too deep to be affected by anchor dragging.
In contrast, the North and Baltic sea are a hodgepodge of individual nations' 12-mile zones, the Baltic Sea operates under an entirely different set of agreements that guarantee free passage, and it's not really deep so submarine infrastructure like cables can be hit by anything from anchors to divers with explosives.
Because Russia is getting the US on their side at the moment, sabotaging their stuff would damage that relationship. Russia and the US are not enemies at the moment.
Because the EU has a very different reaction pattern and overall resources. It was never a question about downing ships that are sabotaging cables.
Neither the EU countries, nor the US have enough ships to patrol or escort every civilian ship that happens to parse over an undersea cable.
Assume that the Russian shadow fleet starts targetting US cables. What would, could, the US do? The US government could easily retaliate by simply opening the US weapons depos to the Ukrainians. Target US infrastructure and Ukraine gets whatever it wants. The EU can't really do something similar.
Technically you're not wrong, if the EU navies where large enough, they could just escort every single civilian ship, but that's not realistic.
its not about hard power necessarily, but soft power. If the EU united politically and made these harassment attacks consequential then they would stop.
E.g. perhaps something along the lines of prison for captains who were 'derelict in duty', rewards to crews who grass and seizing ships that, by dragging anchors 'by accident', have proven themselves unseaworthy etc.
I believe something like this will happen, sooner or later. For now, it's not easily to organize as the crew can always use the excuse "oh, this was unintentional" but charging them with the cost of repair plus additional penalty could be a good starting point.
> but charging them with the cost of repair plus additional penalty could be a good starting point.
Good luck enforcing that. The "shadow fleet" ships all operate under flags of convenience and ownership is hidden behind layers upon layers of shell companies.
The problem is, the oil tankers are single wall, shoddily maintained, probably contaminated with all sorts of nasty stuff and with barely any history records. These things are effectively floating time bombs - assuming you can find a buyer for the seized cargo given the lack of paperwork in the first place, you need to sell the ship for scrap because it's nowhere near seaworthy (remember: single wall, no Western insurer will handle that), and that costs a loooot of money if you are a Western country and can't just haul it off to Alang [1] or whatever place and let others deal with the fallout.
I'm aware of the dolphins. It's become an in-joke among friends that the Crimean invasion started to get the military dolphins back for the cable attacks.
Maybe, but the Gulf of Finland alone (where the incidents with the Eagle 2 occurred) is 30.000 square kilometers; the amount of ships (or planes etc) and coverage you need and the associated cost is huge.
I mean putting an officer / escort on board of each ship to make sure they're not doing anything weird would be an option, but I'm fairly sure that's against international law or anything. The issue is also that these are international waters - the Eagle went right through a narrow corridor of international waters - where it's a bit of the wild west.
There's a long-standing requirement at major ports that a local harbor pilot be on board to guide ships on their way in or out of a harbor. Requiring an observer on board when transiting areas with a concentration of critical underwater infrastructure seems at least conceptually similar -- though the logistics of making it happen would be very different.
I think this was intended as snark about how one of the recent Baltic submarine cable outages was eventually attributed to on-shore damage from an excavator.
Easy solution- seize any tanker coming from a Russian port. Revoke all insurance or bullshit maritime chicanery that allows hiding the beneficial owner.
Why even have sanctions if you don't enforce them.
Yep, Russia is risking it's $80 billion per year in oil sales shadow fleet to cut cables that haven't once caused HN users to lose their porn for even a day.
Cool story bro's keep smoking it up now it's legal along with big pharma, what could go wrong.
These ships can barely stop their anchor safety equipment from rusting out but they are full of secret spy stuff to cut cables. I think once someone saw a keyboard with Russian letters on it even.
I don't think they are, Europe spreads this disinformation as lame wanna-bes pretending they are also under attack, Russia is burning down their Ikeas.
To avoid pay them, is quite laugh out loud - "remotely detonates the explosive early — to kill the witness and also avoid paying them"
You have a pattern of writing shallow dismissals (including deflections to other topics) about anything aligned with the current US administration grievances, are you one of the true believers?
Every thread tangentially about Russia gets a couple of these brand new accounts with uninformly pro-Russian comments. Usually it's the only comment they ever make.
No, the world seems pretty committed to backing Ukraine in its defense against an invader. Only Putin, his puppets, and their useful idiots who consume Putin's propaganda seem to be "tired of it".
The ship in this case was the Eagle S, estimated to be costing the owner €14,500 per day in running costs while impounded.[0] If the owners abandon the ship, that's a ~$30m asset forfeited, which could be used to compensate the cable owner for the damage.
How much does it cost to fix a broken cable? Here's one estimate saying $2m[1].
Monitoring cable breaks + rapid reaction + police investigation + asset seizure + criminal prosecution = increases the cost of this attack.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_S
[1] https://subtelforum.com/8m-to-restore-subsea-cable-services/
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