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.
