Russia Trains to Sabotage Europe’s Undersea Cables - NATO Stops Secret Deep-Sea Operation off Svalbard

Deep below the waters off Svalbard, Russian special-purpose submarines practiced something this spring that could be devastating for Europe in the event of war: taking undersea cables out of service, preferably in a way that leaves nobody able to immediately prove who did it. According to Western government officials, Russia’s GUGI deep-sea unit carried out the secret operation. Special-purpose submersibles were used to simulate the deployment of a new technology whose exact workings those involved are keeping quiet about. Britain, Norway and the United States, however, had found the Russian vessels. They tracked them, confronted them at sea and prevented the exercise from being completed. Russia broke it off and withdrew. No cable was damaged. That is the good news, but not much more than that. Because the training was for a possible conflict with NATO, and right there are two fiber-optic cables, each around 1,400 kilometers long, running between Svalbard and mainland Norway. As deep as 2,700 meters below the surface, they carry enormous amounts of data from the SvalSat satellite station, the largest ground station of its kind in the world and part of NASA’s network.

You have to understand what we are talking about here. These cables are barely thicker than a garden hose, yet internet traffic, financial transactions, satellite data and military communications depend on lines like these. A ship disappears again, a special-purpose submarine dives, and down below a connection can be gone that millions of people up above never even knew existed until it stops working. U.S. intelligence analysts now fear Russia could one day try to find out just how far it can go against NATO and how Article 5 would actually be answered. Destroying undersea cables would not be some sideshow in a conflict like that. Norway and Britain therefore went one step further and presented Moscow with what they had found. Russia was supposed to know that the operation had been discovered and that the new technology had not remained hidden either. Norwegian Defense Minister Tore Sandvik made it unmistakably clear that an attack on critical infrastructure would be detected and would have consequences. Moscow denies plans for sabotage and any preparation for a confrontation with NATO. Washington and London have long since imposed sanctions on GUGI.

And this incident does not stand alone. Poland, Lithuania and Romania have reported violations and attacks in recent months for which Russia has been blamed. After the attempted drone attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport in August, Germany closed a Russian consulate in Bonn and a cultural center in Berlin. CIA Director John Ratcliffe also traveled to Moscow in August and warned there against any further expansion of Russian sabotage operations in Europe. At the same time, something is happening underwater that is much harder to photograph. Since 2023, more and more ships have been moving suspiciously slowly over pipelines, power lines and telecommunications cables, mapping their locations. In the North Sea, this activity jumped 52 percent in a single year to 13,079 recorded vessels. In the Baltic Sea, at least eleven undersea cables were damaged or cut between October 2023 and the end of 2025. Mapping those lines in international waters is not illegal. But the simple question remains why someone wants to know more and more precisely what lies where on the seabed. Security experts see it as possible groundwork for future sabotage. Since three of the four Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed in 2022, it has been clear just how vulnerable this infrastructure is. Germany has since indicted a Ukrainian over those explosions, a man who was a member of a special forces unit at the time; Ukraine denies any involvement.

NATO has therefore stepped up its surveillance through Baltic Sentry and the British-led Nordic Warden. In August, British, Norwegian and American forces trained around Jan Mayen, right in the Arctic area Russian nuclear submarines from the Kola Peninsula have to pass through on their way into the Atlantic. Norway plans to build a new fiber-optic cable by 2028 linking Svalbard and Jan Mayen to the mainland. Over the decades, Europe has placed more and more of its daily life on the seabed while at the same time keeping fewer and fewer resources available to protect those lines. Now Russia is sending special-purpose submarines there and, according to Western findings, practicing how to take them out in the event of a conflict. This time British, Norwegian and American forces were there and forced the operation to be called off. Next time, nobody should count on them getting there in time.