How Putin’s hydronauts tried to hijack Britain’s undersea cables

Dr Sidharth Kaushal, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told The Telegraph that to affect the UK’s telecom cable networks as a whole, “an opponent would have to conduct sabotage on a sustained basis in a way that would not be deniable”. Energy pipelines under the North Sea are more fragile, however. The Langeled pipeline and others carry a significant proportion of Britain’s gas supply. And Dr Kaushal pointed out that more secure cable networks, which carry military data, are also more susceptible. He continued: “Gugi submarines such as the Belgorod, as well as specialised assets such as the Paltus, X-Ray and Losharik, are complex targets but are detectable by the same means used to track other more conventionally military Russian submarines...However, in peacetime there are limited avenues with which to constrain their activity beyond attribution. The challenge is compounded by the fact that Russia is increasingly likely to use smaller uncrewed systems for tasks such as surveillance and potentially sabotage, and tracking these systems can prove challenging. It is likely that these assets can have still gathered data – something which navies and organisations like GUGI can legally do in peacetime as long as they are in international waters. However, by monitoring activity, the Royal Navy can both build a level of awareness about what infrastructure is being mapped and potentially recover any surveillance assets left behind by Russian submarines...It can also build a degree of awareness regarding Russian tactics – for example, the apparent use of an Akula attack submarine to draw attention away from GUGI submarines in this most recent incident.”