European governments point finger at Russia over Baltic cable cuts

Initially international bodies danced around the subject of the cable cuts, but talk of deliberate sabotage intensified and governments are top-level politicians are no longer shying away from pointing the finger.

"We are deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea. The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times," read a joint statement published by the Foreign Ministers of Germany and Finland.

"Our European security is not only under threat from Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors. Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies," the ministers said.

Meanwhile, a subsequent lengthier statement from the Foreign Ministers of Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Spain and the UK pointed to a more general threat to security from Russia.

"Russia is systematically attacking European security architecture," the ministers said as part of a broader mission statement on defence and security in Europe, which, among other things, went to great lengths to talk up the strength and importance of NATO.

"Russia is increasingly reliant on partners such as Iran and North Korea in order to sustain its illegal warfare," they said. "Moscow's escalating hybrid activities against NATO and EU countries are also unprecedented in their variety and scale, creating significant security risks."

Admittedly, neither of the two statements specifically claim 'Russia did it,' or similar. But equally, there's not a lot of ambiguity in there, particularly from the German and Polish ministers.

The cables went down on Sunday and Monday. The first, connecting Lithuania to Sweden, was announced by Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT, quoting Telia's local unit. The second is the C-Lion1 cable between Finland and Germany; its operator, Cinia, said it detected a fault in the early hours of Monday morning. In both cases, immediate investigations ensued.

"The suspected sabotage of Germany's undersea cables raises significant legal implications. Like the Nord Stream incidents, there is likely to be a complex and lengthy investigation to determine the cause and identify those responsible," commented Ben Knowles, Partner and Global Arbitration Group Chair at law firm Clyde & Co, referring to damage to gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in 2022.

"The investigation could span years, given all the technical, geopolitical, and jurisdictional factors involved," Knowles warned.

While governments apportion blame, the telecoms industry needs to turn its attention to ways to mitigate the growing issue of cable sabotage...presuming that's what this turns out to be.

"There have been many stories of high-profile cable cuts this year, highlighting the need for greater network redundancy," noted Steve Roberts, SVP Network Investment at fibre backbone network operator EXA Infrastructure.

Indeed, it's only just over a year since subsea cables between Estonia, Finland and Sweden were damaged, the prime suspects being Russia and China, given that theirs were the only ships in the area at the time. And there have been other similar incidents since then.

Roberts has a vested interest in pushing the idea of network redundancy, of course. But he also has a point.

"We are so reliant on these vital pathways to transport data, that more investment into alternative paths is needed to ensure that when a cable is down, whatever the reason, traffic isn't impacted," he said. "We are seeing governments and regulators starting to take the security of subsea cables more seriously, and this, coupled with continued investment into new projects, will mean that the impact of outages can be lessened in future."

Ultimately, the very fact that subsea cables are becoming a prime target in international conflict underscores the critical nature of data transport in today's world. This is an area that will only get more attention in the coming years.