Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO.
On Christmas Day last year, Finland received a special kind of gift. Four undersea cables were damaged in the country’s waters within the course of a few hours, but Finland was already alert and watching, having decided such tricks were rather likely. And it was able to catch the perpetrator in flagrante delicto.
But we can’t count on the stars aligning every time a cable or pipeline suffers mysterious damage. This is why the U.K.-led Joint Expeditionary Force’s (JEF) plan to monitor the Baltic Sea’s undersea installations is a good next step. But we must also find creative ways of incentivizing ship crews to obey the rules of our waters.
We should hand it to the Finns. When this type of damage to the Baltic Sea’s cables and pipelines became a reliable trend last autumn, the country’s authorities stepped up their already active surveillance in the Gulf of Finland. Granted, it’s a small body of water, with similarly small shipping lanes, but Finland made sure no movement went unseen. And lo and behold, on Dec. 25, the Cook Islands-flagged Eagle S tanker crisscrossed the gulf, damaging not one but four undersea cables.
We know all this because Finnish authorities were actively observing. Better yet, the tanker was only slightly outside Finnish territorial waters, and authorities managed to coax the captain into sailing back into territorial waters. Had the ship remained in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ), very little could have been done.
There’s no two ways about it, the Finns got lucky — though as the saying goes, “the harder I practice, the luckier I get.” Had Finland not maintained such close surveillance or practiced what actions to take if a vessel dragged its anchor, the Eagle S could have easily gotten away with it.
We can’t assume this will be the case every time a ship damages our undersea infrastructure with apparent intent. We can’t assume our navies and coast guards will be able to catch the perpetrators in the act, and we can’t be sure it will all occur in our territorial waters — vessels wishing to cause such harm deliberately do so in EEZs. And no, we can’t assume we’ll be able to coax the ship into territorial waters as the Finns did.
This makes the new Nordic Warden initiative a crucial development. Announced on Jan. 6 by the JET — a military grouping comprising the U.K., the Netherlands and the Nordic and Baltic nations — it “harnesses AI to assess data from a range of sources, including the Automatic Identification System (AIS) ships use to broadcast their position, to calculate the risk posed by each vessel entering areas of interest.”
The action also reinforces existing and planned NATO responses: “Specific vessels identified as being part of Russia’s shadow fleet have been registered into the system so they can be closely monitored when approaching areas of interest. If a potential risk is assessed, the system will monitor the suspicious vessel in real time and immediately send out a warning, which will be shared with JEF participant nations, as well as NATO Allies.”
This is a pioneering effort to keep the Baltic Sea’s pipelines and cables safe. Although it seems entirely sensible for nations to collectively gather data suggesting interference with undersea installations, until recently, there was simply no reason to conduct such monitoring.
The last two-or-so years have radically changed this notion. Indeed, just a few days after Nordic Warden was announced, NATO introduced Baltic Sentry — an initiative that will see alliance frigates and maritime aircraft patrol the Baltic Sea, aided by naval drones and other technology.
No one can accuse NATO’s Baltic Sea members of not responding to nefarious undersea activities. And these countries are now hoping that the uptick in monitoring and patrolling will convince prospective saboteurs that harming Baltic Sea cables and pipelines isn’t worth it. In particular, they’re hoping to convince the captains of shadow vessels — many of whom come from developing nations — that conducting sabotage on behalf of Russia would be a bad idea.
The Eagle S crew, which is now being investigated by Finnish authorities, are precisely such a group. We don’t know yet what caused the Eagle S to drag its anchor for such a long time in waters that contain clearly marked undersea cables, and we may never learn the full story. What’s clear, though, is that in the past 18 months, the Baltic Sea has seen three major cases of damage to undersea installations.
But not all the ships that have damaged the Baltic Sea’s undersea installations were shadow vessels. On the contrary, the suspects in the October 2023 and November 2024 cable cuts were legally sailing ships owned by Chinese companies — one flagged in Hong Kong and one in China — and crewed by Chinese citizens. Boarding, let alone detaining, such ships would be quite different than acting against a ship flagged in the Cook Islands.
Indeed, if Finnish authorities were to board a Chinese-flagged ship in the Finnish EEZ, China would likely retaliate. At the very least, Beijing or Moscow (or both) would argue that shipping in the Baltic Sea now requires an escort by the People’s Liberation Army Navy, the Russian Navy or both. A recent report by the Danish Intelligence Service warned of precisely this scenario.
That’s why NATO and the JEF are betting that their forceful signaling will be enough — though odds are it won’t.
Still, even Chinese and Russian shipmasters and crews love their freedom. To be sure, if autocratic authorities tell a shipmaster to cut undersea cables, they may feel they have no choice. But countries in the Baltic Sea and elsewhere could communicate to them that it would be a bad idea to damage cables — and that they may even be rewarded if they abide by maritime rules.
This is the type of creative thinking we need in order to figure out how governments can best incentivize good maritime behavior, and we should all pitch in with ideas. I’ll start: What if we considered political asylum for shipmasters and crews of NATO-identified suspect vessels who comply with instructions not to harm infrastructure? Feel free to send me your suggestions.
The post Let’s get creative to protect undersea cables from sabotage appeared first on Politico.
