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.

I'd bet a significant fraction of my net worth that Europeans will embrace Russian energy after the war.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/24/eu-spends-more...

Isn't this comparing government spending to consumer spending? Because that energy is paid for by the population at the end the line directly.

It singlehandedly and instantly removed a major blocker to European support for Ukraine, at an uncertain time.

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.

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the...

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.

Although the truth may never be known.

Edit: for clarity

"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.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/11/27/u-s-germany-re...

Do you moonlight as a strategist for the Democratic party?

I'm certain they do, however, have folks who dictate policy so they don't lose any donations from certain large foreign orgs.

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!"

Both were like watching Asimov try and write an emotional speech. People != robots.

I mean, I sure wish they had some good ones.

AOC is the future, IMO, if we do, indeed, have a future.

It isn't China though its Russia, it was Chinese company that owned the ship but it was a Russian captain and it had just left Russia.

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.

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.

Welcome to hybrid warfare! This is the point.

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 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.

https://blog.telegeography.com/what-happens-when-submarine-c...

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...)

World wide. A bit different from Baltic Sea only.

You should rather wonder why do you hear so much of it now.

For instance, from https://www.iscpc.org/publications/ you can find https://www.iscpc.org/documents/?id=138 which has statistics over the years by source of damage (spoiler: no russian spy nor UFOs)

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.

It's tempting to say "if it's such a problem why don't they just monitor better?", but the ocean is vast.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal

However, dolphins don't have as much depth capacity as other whales. I'd choose sperm whales for this, if they were trainable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiology_of_underwater_divin...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most likely, they prop it as a huge win domestically, so that the public keeps thinking they are winning and become easier to placate.

Then why don't these sabotages happen in US waters if it's so easy to get away with it?

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56196069

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.

This is only effective because there are no real consequences for it.

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

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/

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.

Even oligarchs don't like to light money on fire.

[0] https://spacenews.com/space-force-preparing-for-the-age-of-p...

Russia's war with Ukraine is not profitable for Russian oligarchs or Russia itself yet it continues

Europe's response has been and continues to be nothing less than shambolic and shameful.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/24/eu-spends-more...

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.

Meanwhile, EU financial aid to Ukraine in 2024 stands at €18.7 billion, compared to €21.9 billion paid for Russian fossil fuels (https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/eu-imports-of-russ...). But military support tells a different story: the EU and member states have committed €48.7 billion in military aid, including tanks, air-defense systems, and fighter jets (https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/military-support...).

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."

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.

A ship that leaves port to cut a cable and then back to the same port loses all plausible deniability.

The whole thing with this kind of sabotage is that looks like a ship doing ship things except with a "defective" anchor system, "oops".

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/bell-subsea-fibre...

If you didn't bother to properly investigate NS, why bother with some random cable?

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...

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"

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.

Congratulations, the minefield is permanently switched off: https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/BALTIC-SEA-AIS/ship-traf...

Wtf? Obviously you can't post like this here. If you do it again, we will ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. We've had to ask you about this more than once before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41417042 (Sept 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37665245 (Sept 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29957648 (Jan 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687873 (Dec 2021)

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.

I imagine there must be some other deterrent measure but drawing a blank. My brother was the navy man...

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not alone in believing that this alone is reason enough to risk everything. A threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.

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.

> We should spend money on deterrence.

Then

> You don't need to deter what doesn't exist.

I guess next you'll say Russia isn't even at war with Ukraine and we shouldn't believe our lying eyes?

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.

Things just changed, so it will take a while to see what is actually happening. But they did claim to have increased a lot what they send to Ukraine.

- Investing in deterrence is cost effective... up to a point.

- Directly sending Ukraine arms is cost effective... up to a point.

Right now, it's fair to say that (relative to Russia) Europe has been underinvesting in defense for a couple decades.

Good news: they seem to have recognized this and invested in recapitalizing their industrial defense base.

So much of that money is going to close the capability gaps.

Henry Kissinger: "Who do I call if I want to call Europe?"

The irony of Trump being in power is that this might just happen during his term. I really hope so.

The world is tired of it. In the Zelensky-Trump row, Trump exploded when Zelensky used the old propaganda "if you do not support Ukraine, the U.S. will be under attack in several years" and told him to stop that nonsense.

To Zelensky's excuse, this of course had been the Biden party line for 3 years, so he was just using the old talking points.

Many people see through this now despite being heavily propagandized by the press.

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".

Congrats on being one of today's few.

Why even have sanctions if you don't enforce them.