Saad HasanOn December 25, 2024, Finnish special forces helicoptered onto the oil tanker Eagle S in the Gulf of Finland. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo had interrupted his Christmas holiday with family to give the orders himself. This was the first time since World War II that the Finnish military carried out such an operation.
Over the course of six hours that day, Eagle S had dragged its anchor across the seabed of the Baltic Sea for 100 kilometres, severing a powerline and three fibre-optic cables.
The incident made headlines with European officials and politicians calling the ship part of Russia’s “shadow fleet”, which is used to skirt sanctions on Russian energy exports. They also accused Moscow of carrying out “hybrid warfare” by deploying cargo ships that deliberately target undersea cables.
The captain of Eagle S told Finnish authorities that the vessel’s anchor came loose accidentally. But Finnish Coast Guard Commander Mikko Simola told CBS's primetime show 60 Minutes that it was hard to believe the captain was unaware for such a long time whether the anchor was hoisted or not.
Ships’ anchors damaging cables is nothing unusual. Every week, four cables get damaged on average somewhere in the world because of accidents caused by human error, according to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC).
The two main industry bodies, ICPC and the European Subsea Cable Association (ESCA), say that there’s no evidence to suggest that sabotage was behind the thousands of accidents recorded so far.
“I don’t recall any incident where the physical network was [deliberately] attacked,” says Julian Rawle, a fibre-optic cable consultant.
“It’s more of a hype,” he tells TRT World. “I use the word hysteria. People don’t seem to understand that we can switch traffic from one cable to another quickly.”
Since the Russia-Ukraine war began in 2022 and Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up a year later in the Baltic Sea, officials have constantly spoken about the security of cables and pointed at recurring accidents as evidence of a deteriorating situation.
Despite all the concerns surrounding the incident involving Eagle S, a Finnish court last year dismissed charges of alleged sabotage against the ship's owner and the crew, which consisted of Georgian and Indian nationals.
This hasn’t stopped security hawks from bringing up the spectre of cables being attacked deliberately in news articles, think tank analysis and parliamentary discussions.
But is it really such a major cause for concern? The facts suggest otherwise.
The usual suspects
ICPC and ESCA say that accidents linked to fishing boats and cargo vessels are more likely to damage cables than deliberate sabotage.
Fishermen rely on bottom trawling, called demersal trawling, to scoop shellfish from the seafloor with the type of heavy nets that have metal doors. Fibre optic cables snap when they get caught between the doors.
Fishing is the single largest cause of submarine cable faults, according to ICPC. In its March 2021 report, ICPC attributed nearly 41 percent of cable damage to fishermen.
The second-biggest culprit is dragging anchors, which can damage undersea cables when cargo ships leave them trailing along the seabed – often as a result of human error or negligence by the captain and crew. It is also the most politically charged cause of such incidents.
Between late 2023 and early 2025, a series of incidents involving Russia's “shadow fleet” and Chinese vessels in the Baltic Sea set alarm bells ringing in Brussels and other European capitals, where concerns over the prolonged war in Ukraine were already running high.
The fear of deliberate cable sabotage reached such a height that the ESCA had to issue a statement on LinkedIn, reminding lawmakers that only four anchor-drag accidents were recorded in the Baltic Sea between 2023 and 2025, compared with seven in UK waters between 2007 and 2009.
While there are hundreds of subsea oil and gas pipelines and electricity cables known as interconnectors, governments are focused on the security and safety of 596 fibre optic cables that crisscross ocean floors.
Almost all of the world’s internet traffic is carried by these fibre optic cables, each the size of a garden hose. Whether it’s a post you see on Instagram or the $12 trillion that central banks move each day, all online activity depends on these cables.
With AI applications flooding the market and the threat of cyber attacks increasing, there’s a heightened fear that a bad actor might try to damage the vital internet connection or worse.
But Rawle says an attack is more likely on the fibre optic infrastructure on the seashore and in the water.
In any case, most developed countries have internet access connected by more than two cables and data transfer switches from one cable to another without noticeable glitches, he says.
Around 98 percent of cables that have been damaged lie within 200 nautical miles from the coast, an area that has the highest concentration of shipping and human activity, says ICPC.
Russian oil tankers are more likely to be involved in accidents because they are old. The average age of tankers used to transport Russian oil increased from 15.4 years in 2020 to 29.3 years in January 2024. Sanctions have made it difficult for Russian companies to book tankers from elsewhere.
Since the first transoceanic fibre optic cable, TAT-8, was built between the US, UK and France in 1988, humans have intentionally, or due to negligence, damaged the cables in many different ways. Organised attack was not one of them.
What’s in it for Sunak?
In the 1990s, Rene van Kessel worked at Van Oord Offshore, a Netherlands-based marine contractor, which built rock installations to protect undersea cables, power lines and oil pipes. At the time, fishing boat-related accidents were damaging so many cables and pipes that Kessel would joke with his bosses that they could rent a fishing boat, drag it over the cables, sever them and then do rock installation work for a profit.
“I know where the cables are. It’s public information. So we could have earned more money,” he says. “Of course we never did that.”
Kessel is a marine industry veteran with decades of experience. He and many others like him have watched with concern as the issue of protecting cables from fishing boats has gradually turned into a matter of national security.
Late last year, the Russian research vessel Yantar, tracked by the Royal Navy near UK waters, caused an uproar in London. British officials, including then defence secretary John Healey, were concerned that Yantar was a spy ship sent to map undersea cables, leaving the country’s internet access vulnerable.
But industry people like Kessel insist that the location of cables is public information and anyone can easily figure out a cable’s location.
“I think defence organisations and companies see a threat because they want to sell their products,” says Kessel.
“Cable sabotage has never been proven. But all these defence companies jump in and say they have a solution, which is not the case. You cannot avoid damage to cables,” he says.
“The military boys like their toys.”
In May 2026, the AUKUS security alliance between the US, UK and Australia announced that it will develop and deploy unmanned submarines for the protection of fibre optic cables. The UK alone will contribute $201 million for the project.
Rawle, the fibre-optic cable consultant, says that one of the first high-ranking officials who raised the possibility of an attack on cables was former British prime minister Rishi Sunak.
Sunak was an MP from Richmond, Yorkshire, in 2017, when he authored a report Undersea Cables: Indispensable, Insecure. The report highlighted the vulnerability of the cables and the threat posed by Russia, which he accused of causing an internet blackout in 2014 when it was annexing Crimea.
“I don’t know what Rishi’s motivation was in the first place, but that to me is where governments started to get aware that these cables actually carry 99 percent of the world’s internet traffic,” says Rawle, the consultant.
“It was really designed to get more budget for the British Navy, and it succeeded in the end. The British Navy actually now has a couple of vessels stationed around the North and Baltic seas to try to prevent sabotage.”
Over the years, several attempts have been made to cut the cables and extract copper, which fetches good money in the scrap market. In 2013, Egyptian authorities arrested three scuba divers who tried to steal a section of SEA-ME-WE 4 cable and a few years earlier, fishermen scooped up 80 tonnes of cable off the coast of Vietnam believing everything that lies in the water was up for grabs.
But these innocuous incidents have completely gone off the radar of politicians and military officials.
Manufacturing a sabotage
The US and UK lawmakers have held multiple hearings on this issue and published detailed reports. What’s interesting is that experts who have come to testify have stated the same facts: it is not sabotage but fishing boats and accidental anchor-drag incidents, which tend to damage cables.
For instance, in November 2025, Tim Stronge, the Chief Research Officer at TeleGeography, which works with telecom companies, told the US House of Representatives Committee that cable networks experience around 200 faults a year.
“It is critical to understand that the vast majority of cable damage is accidental, not malicious,” he said in his written response.
Similarly, ESCA’s Vice Chair Peter Jamieson told the UK Parliament in February last year: “There is no evidence, publicly available, to say that Russia (or anyone else) is deliberately targeting cables. That’s not to say the threat doesn’t possibly exist.”
Experts say there’s no denying that the Russian military has used brute force against Ukraine and created a sense of insecurity for Europe’s eastern flank. Moscow has also been accused of cyberattacks on key installations in Norway and other European states.
However, they warn that too much emphasis on something that has never happened complicates the work of companies, which are building fibre-optic and power cables in the waters.
“We, in the submarine cable industry, used to complain that governments weren't paying enough attention and weren't setting up regulatory regimes that protected the cables,” says Rawle.
"And now we're in a position where we're actually a bit worried that there's going to be government overreach.”
