The French naval patrol plane descended rapidly through the clouds, leveling off at 900 feet above the Baltic Sea, practically skimming the waves. The target was a Russian warship, which came into view off the plane’s port side, dark gray against a light gray horizon.
The aircraft, an Atlantique 2 of the French Navy, was designed to hunt submarines and other enemy naval craft, but on this day its torpedo bay was empty and its only weapons were a high-resolution camera and other sophisticated surveillance instruments. The goal was to observe, and be seen observing.
“We are to show that we are here,” said Romain, a lieutenant commander and a member of the plane’s crew.
Never fully tranquil, the Baltic Sea, with a coastline heavily militarized by Northern European and Russian navies, has become an increasingly tense theater in the conflict between Moscow and the West. Later on the patrol, Russian forces attempted to jam the plane’s GPS, and at one point, another Russian warship locked on to the plane with radar, a warning that it could open fire. Russian naval ships and a submarine were visible in the sea below.
But the main reason the French naval plane was on patrol lay underwater. Three times over the past year and a half, commercial ships are suspected of having damaged critical undersea communications cables and a gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea. European officials fear that these were acts of sabotage, with the Kremlin viewed as the primary suspect, though finding hard evidence has proved difficult.
In response, NATO announced in January the start of a new program called Baltic Sentry, boosting sea and air patrols of the Baltic Sea. Though mostly reliant on NATO members with Baltic coastlines, like Sweden, Finland and Poland, the French and the British also participate, along with U.S. Marines deployed to Finland.
At its inception, Baltic Sentry was hailed as an example of NATO’s renewal, and so far the mission has continued uninterrupted. This is despite President Trump’s frequent attacks on the 76-year-old military pact and his friendly overtures to the alliance’s most vociferous opponent, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Since the start of Baltic Sentry — announced days before Mr. Trump took office — no further cases of suspected sabotage have occurred in the Baltic Sea.
“It is indicative of the alliance’s ability to rapidly respond to such destabilization,” U.S. Army General Christopher G. Cavoli, the supreme allied commander Europe, said of Baltic Sentry in January, “and shows the strength of our unity in the face of any challenge.”
Though officially Baltic Sentry is not directed against any particular country, Russia is clearly top of mind. This was evident throughout the patrol this month aboard the French naval aircraft. At the start of its patrol, the plane plunged low to observe the movements of the first Russian warship it encountered. There is little desire to provoke the Russians, said Romain, the lieutenant commander, though occasionally things escalate. As a precaution, each crew member is issued a parachute in case a midair evacuation is needed.
“It’s a touchy situation,” Romain said, speaking on condition that only his first name and rank be used in accordance with French military rules.
During the 14-hour mission, about a dozen crew members squeezed into a tight fuselage with an array of computer monitors showing satellite and radar data. The plane took off around 6 in the morning from a French airfield, traversed the length of the Baltic, from the northern coast of Germany to the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, then returned.
But it was the Baltiysk naval base, headquarters of Russia’s Baltic Fleet, that was a focus of the crew’s attention. The plane had only been in range of the base, in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, for a few minutes when the instruments onboard began to show signs of GPS jamming.
Below, a Russian attack submarine and several frigates cruised the waves. A crew member used the plane’s camera to zoom in on the vessels, while another flipped through a heavy reference manual of known naval craft trying to identify them. The camera also zoomed in on the base, where more craft were docked.
At one point, the targeting radar of one Russian ship briefly locked onto the French plane, which remained in international waters. Though this could be an indication the ship was preparing to fire, crew members said it was likely an attempt to gauge the plane’s altitude. In any case, the French military later expressed outrage.
“This intimidation is part of unnecessarily aggressive actions hindering freedom of navigation,” said a message posted to the X account of the French military’s Joint Staff.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe has struggled with how to respond to a series of unusual occurrences, including suspected arson attacks and explosions, as well as assassination plots, that intelligence services increasingly assess to be part of a Kremlin campaign of sabotage. Though the Kremlin has denied its agents carry out sabotage, intelligence officials revealed last fall that fires at two DHL shipping hubs in Britain and Germany were part of a Russian plot to put incendiary devices aboard cargo planes.
It was the severing of undersea cables in the Baltic that ultimately prompted NATO to act.
In late December, Finnish commandos descended from helicopters and seized control of an oil tanker called the Eagle S, which officials suspected had cut electrical and data cables linking Finland and Estonia. The robust military response followed similar episodes of civilian ships damaging undersea cables. A month earlier, a Chinese-owned bulk carrier called the Yi Peng 3 was forced to anchor in the Baltic, suspected of severing two undersea fiber optic cables. This resembled a case from a year earlier, when a Hong Kong-flagged cargo ship appeared to damage a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia.
No hard evidence has emerged indicating the ships’ crews intentionally damaged the undersea infrastructure, let alone that the Kremlin directed them to do so. The ships were all flagged to different countries — though none to Russia — had different owners and were headed in different directions. In other cases, an initial suspicion of sabotage has not born out. In January, authorities seized a cargo ship suspected of damaging a communications cable linking Sweden and Latvia. Investigators later determined that bad weather combined with poor seamanship likely caused the damage.
What links the other cases is a modus operandi: All seemed to have dropped their anchors midvoyage, dragging them along the sea floor in a way that damaged critical infrastructure.
Shipping experts say it is highly unlikely crew members could fail to notice and immediately address this. That connection was enough to convince some leaders that something more nefarious than simple negligence had occurred.
“We should keep in mind that Russia is not omnipotent; it can’t do everything,” Juha Martelius, Finland’s intelligence chief, said in televised remarks in January. “But it can do a lot, and therefore it’s important for us both nationally and in international cooperation to be vigilant about what happens in the Baltic Sea.”
The Kremlin has dismissed accusations that Russia was behind a sabotage campaign in the Baltic Sea as “absurd.”
Military and shipping experts largely praised the Baltic Sentry operation, though some said it did too little. The Baltic Sea is vulnerable given Russia’s access via several ports, but it is also, many point out, “a NATO lake,” ringed by eight members of the alliance, and therefore much easier to secure. More difficult is protecting critical infrastructure elsewhere, particularly the North Sea with its wind farms and oil infrastructure, as well as cables crossing the Atlantic Ocean from off Ireland’s coast.
Baltic Sentry also does little to interfere with Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, a collection of aged tankers that, Western officials say, Moscow uses to covertly carry Russian crude around the world. The fleet is key to Russia’s ability to finance its war in Ukraine, and Western nations have been largely unable to do anything about it. An exception was the ship that Finnish commandos commandeered in January. Officials have said it bore the hallmarks of shadow fleet vessels.
“Russia is using a shadow oil fleet to make its revenues and get around sanctions,” said Justin Crump, the chief executive of a private intelligence firm, Sibylline, and a maritime security expert. “We know they’re doing it, we know exactly how they’re doing it and yet we’re not allowed to stop it. If we were serious, we would stop it. That’s the missing ingredient.”
Aboard the French Atlantique 2, Romain said, crews closely monitored ships suspected of operating as part of the shadow fleet, but acknowledged there was little the military could do but watch them.
“There is no procedure to stop them in international waters,” he said. “There are no specific agreements to board them.”
At points during the patrol, the plane’s captain received reports about ships behaving suspiciously. One had recently left the Russian port of Ust-Luga and another was headed to the Russian port of Primorsk. In each instance, the captain contacted the ships and questioned them about their journey.
“Are you aware of the NATO activity Baltic Sentry?” the captain asked each of them, then inquired whether any had seen suspicious maritime activity.
Each radioed back the same answer: No.
Johanna Lemola contributed reporting from Helsinki, Finland.
Michael Schwirtz is an investigative reporter with the International desk. With The Times since 2006, he previously covered the countries of the former Soviet Union from Moscow and was a lead reporter on a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for articles about Russian intelligence operations. More about Michael Schwirtz
James Hill is a photographer working on a regular basis for The Times since 1993. He is currently based in Paris. More about James Hill
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