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.

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.

> And even if the war ends, Europeans will be ware of sending their money to a country that may use it against them.

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...

"EU spends more on Russian oil and gas than financial aid to Ukraine – report"

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 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.

Only 3/4 NS pipes were blown and in 2 places miles apart. The first explosion was likely and accident, the second intentional.

The Ukranians blowing up NS (allegedly) has to have been one of the most strategically brilliantly covert operations in modern times.

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

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:

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

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.

2022 Pew

"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...

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.

> This sounds like a situation where even if it is deliberate enemy action the appropriate thing to do is ask them to stop.

Do you moonlight as a strategist for the Democratic party?

That's funny; they obviously don't have any strategists.

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

> 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!"

The best thing the democrats could do on strategy would be to blocklist anyone who worked on the Clinton or Harris campaigns.

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

Fair point, I meant good/effective ones.

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

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

> 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.

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.

But if China wanted to separate themselves from this it would be extremely easy to punish those involved from their side

> 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.

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.

Hah, yes, there are definitely not 100 to 200 breakages in the Baltic Sea alone :D

> My personal opinion so far is that this whole thing is teetering between media frenzy and actual issue.

Welcome to hybrid warfare! This is the point.

> 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.

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...)

> As mentioned elsewhere, there are between 100-200 cable breakages annually

World wide. A bit different from Baltic Sea only.

Sure, but if 100-200 happens globally, at least one of those are likely to have been in the Baltic Sea.

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.

You've never heard about it because it's not newsworthy.

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

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.

When I did look for it not so long ago I was able to find several publications with pre-2023 statistics, which ranged from 100 to 500 per years.

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)

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.

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.