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)
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"