A submarine data communications cable across the Baltic Sea between Finland and Germany has broken, Finnish authorities said, amid fears it may have been sabotaged.
The Finnish state-controlled data services provider, Cinia, said ‘a fault’ was detected Monday in the C-Lion1 cable that runs nearly 1,200 kilometers (746 miles) from the Finnish capital, Helsinki, to the German port city of Rostock.
The cable, commissioned in 2016, is Finland’s only data communications cable that runs from the Nordic country directly to central Europe, according to Finnish public broadcaster YLE.
Finnish media outlets noted the cable’s route runs in the vicinity of the two NordStream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany that were sabotaged. Finnish authorities are investigating the source of the cable break.
More than 400 subsea cables form the backbone of the internet, carrying more than 97% of the world’s data traffic.
But Western defense chiefs have warned that the likes of Russia and China, with advanced submersibles and submarine capabilities, could seek to plunge Western nations into disarray by damaging or cutting them.
The sudden breakdown of the Baltic Sea data cable comes days after the Royal Navy announced it was tracking a Russian spy ship straying close to undersea cables in the Irish Sea and RAF jets were scrambled to monitor a Russian reconnaissance plane flying close to UK airspace.
Undersea cables, largely owned and installed by private companies, are designed to withstand the natural rigors under the sea and cannot be cut easily.
Typically just over an inch in diameter, they consist of fiber optics — strands of glass as thin as a hair — in the center, surrounded by galvanized steel wire armoring and then, on the outside, a plastic coating.
They are engineered to the ‘five nines’ standard — meaning they are reliable 99.999 percent of the time, a level generally reserved for nuclear weapons and space shuttles.
But, armed with hydraulic cutters attached to their hulls, Russian submersibles would make short work of the hosepipe-thin cables. Alternatively, divers or remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) fitted with cutters could do the job.
The Yantar, billed by Moscow as an ‘oceanographic research vessel’, is one such ship that boasts advanced submersibles designed for engineering missions that can examine areas up to 3.75 miles underwater.
And it was one of three Russian vessels sailing through the Channel last week.
As it headed toward British shores, the research craft turned off its transponder – erasing it from commercial marine tracking systems.
On Thursday it briefly appeared some 60 kilometers off the coast of Ireland before disappearing again, raising fears it was operating above vital undersea cables responsible for connecting Britain and Ireland and carrying the UK’s digital data.
Despite its official status as a research vessel, a Russian parliament publication previously said the Yantar carries technology ‘designed for deep-sea tracking, as well as equipment for connecting to top-secret communication cables’.
The Royal Navy dispatched HMS Cattistock to shadow the vessel while the RAF sent a Poseidon P8 reconnaissance plane to track its movements.
Meanwhile, two Typhoon fighter jets from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland followed a Russian Tupolev-142, a maritime reconnaissance aircraft known as the ‘Bear-F’ in NATO countries, as it flew over the North Sea.
