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Vital deep-sea cables and pipelines are at risk, the deputy commander of NATO’s Allied Maritime Command has warned. Didier Maleterre.
“This is a security issue for the nearly one billion civilians of NATO countries. We need to be protected and adequately supplied by critical undersea infrastructure,” Maleterre said. Said The Guardian, April 16th.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies have discovered multiple instances of suspicious activity around underwater infrastructure in the past few years, and commanders say Russia is “disrupting Europe’s economy through cables, internet cables and pipelines.” In order to do so, we are conducting many hybrid wars under the sea.”
Maleterre said some of Russia’s nuclear-powered submarines were built for hybrid warfare purposes, and that the Russian submarine that caught fire a few years ago may have been similar. The commander’s concerns come amid rising tensions between NATO.
“All of our undersea economies are under threat,” he said.
As the war in Ukraine escalates, Moscow announced last month that it plans to adopt a Cold War-era stance and increase the number of troops monitoring the borders of NATO countries.
As tensions rise, NATO countries are scanning wide areas of the ocean using sensors, satellites, various submarines and other tools to identify culprits and protect underwater networks.
Maleterre emphasized that these underwater networks are highly vulnerable to attack.
“More than 90% [the] “The Internet is underwater. All the links between the United States, Canada and Europe are being transmitted underwater, so there are a lot of vulnerabilities,” he said.
Many suspicious incidents related to underwater infrastructure have occurred.
In October 2023, communication cables and gas pipelines between Estonia and Finland were damaged due to unknown causes. In February 2022, police investigators discovered that damage to a fiber optic data cable in Norway may have been caused by human intervention. A year ago, a long section of cable disappeared.
One particular incident that received a lot of attention was The Nord Stream gas pipeline will connect Russia and Germany in September 2022. Western officials were quick to blame Russia, but evidence proving Russian involvement in the incident was lacking. Ukraine is also a potential suspect.
NATO officials have long expressed concern about threats to key maritime infrastructure. For example, in 2017, the commander of NATO’s submarine force said: Said The Washington Post reported, “Never-before-seen Russian undersea activity is now being seen near submarine cables.”
“Russia clearly has an interest in NATO and the undersea infrastructure of NATO countries,” he said.
And the war in Ukraine has exacerbated these concerns. Last year, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Under-Secretary-General for Information and Security told reporters that “Russia aims to disrupt Western life in order to gain influence over countries that provide security to Ukraine. “There are growing concerns that it could target undersea cables and other critical infrastructure.”