Russia deploys a fleet to sabotage Western submarine power lines, according to a journalistic investigation

The Russian Navy maintains a frenetic activity in the face of a hypothetical direct confrontation with NATO.

A joint journalistic investigation of the Nordic countries denounces that Russia secretly probes for a decade

Allied submarine cable networks from the Baltic to the British coast to sabotage them in the event of an escalation.

The investigation of the public televisions of Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden has found armed soldiers aboard an alleged Russian scientific ship that stalked key wind farms in the United Kingdom in November, and has registered at least another fifty vessels that they navigated suspiciously through other vantage points in the last decade.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, in the Sea of ​​Japan, Russia's Pacific fleet is carrying out massive surprise exercises with the support of strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

Danish television DR premieres this Wednesday the first chapter of the investigation.

In one of its fragments, journalists approach the supposed Russian scientific ship

It is a civil ship in calm waters.

"I can see members of the crew walking on the deck, I think they are watching us," says the journalist, as he approaches a boat that had turned off its geolocation system and was intercepted thanks to the detection of several messages sent to a ground based.

He then exclaimed a curse word, witnessing the appearance of several men armed with rifles and ski masks.

The

left Kronstadt, near Saint Petersburg, on November 1, 2022, arriving on the Scottish coast on the night of November 10, next to an area where two large offshore wind farms and their connections to land.

"The ship remained here [for two days] zigzagging around the area [of the parks]," says the investigation.

“The speed of the ship is several times below a knot, at about a kilometer per hour.

At night, the boat is basically in the same position."

The boat then headed to the region where Scotland's largest offshore wind farm is being built, capable of supplying power to a million and a half people.

He stopped in that area again for another two days before resuming his march, stopping at two more English wind complexes near the mouth of the Thames and a third Danish one near the island of Anholt, before returning to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

This scientific ship turned off its Automatic Identification System (AIS) so as not to share its location

but the Nordic media traced its return route thanks to its position reports to Russian bases on land — without specifying how they got access. these—and intercepted it in the Kattegat Strait between Sweden and Denmark.

50 suspicious vessels

The Nordic media have also located around 50 more suspicious vessels in the last decade thanks to open data from AIS transmitters

“And these are just a sample of the fleet that Russia can deploy to sabotage undersea networks for Western internet, power, gas and other infrastructure,” warns Norwegian Defense Academy professor Stale Ulriksen.

According to Nordic intelligence, vessels, from small camouflaged fishing boats to huge ships, send all the collected information to the Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research (known as GUGI) of the Russian Defense Ministry.

The mission of this program would be to hit rival logistics.

Neither the ministry nor the Russian embassies in the Nordic countries, except for Norway, responded to questions from journalists.

“There is demand for research vessels and it is carried out in full compliance with international law.

That work is coordinated through diplomatic channels," said the Russian ambassador in Oslo, Teimuraz Ramishvili.

In addition to these operations, Norwegian intelligence warned in February that the Russian Northern Fleet had been equipped with nuclear weapons for the first time since the demise of the Soviet Union, as the Baltic borders had been weakened by moving troops into the invasion. from Ukraine.

Echoes of the Nord Stream

The disclosure of these four countries has upset the Kremlin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, reiterated once again that the accusations leveled against Moscow are persecution against his country.

“They prefer to blame Russia for everything again, without foundation.

We would prefer that they pay more attention to the terrorist attack against Nord Stream, an unprecedented sabotage that needs a transparent, urgent and far-reaching international investigation."

The blowing up of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in September last year has reopened the debate on the strategic weakness around submarine logistics.

The perpetrator of that attack is unknown and all kinds of versions circulate while the official investigations are carried out in secret: the Russian Ministry of Defense initially targeted a team of British saboteurs, and later opted for the disputed version of the journalist Seymour Hersh that the United States and Norway were behind it.

Some US media attribute the action to pro-Ukrainian groups that acted without the knowledge of the Government of Volodimir Zelenski.

The secrecy of this action has highlighted the importance of submarine warfare, a scenario for which Russia has been preparing for years.

The

mini-submarine suffered an accident in 2019 that resulted in 14 deaths.

According to the official version of the Russian Defense Ministry, the ship was carrying out deep-sea investigations at the time of the incident.

However, the Russian press reported at that time of less censorship that this ship was “designed to carry out operations at a depth of up to six kilometers.

In particular, the deployment of a wide variety of sensors and the cutting of submarine cables”, according to a chronicle at the time in the newspaper

Ships of the Russian Pacific Fleet were preparing to take part in military exercises near the Russian port of Vladivostok on Friday.AP

The

carried out its first mission in 2012, when it left for the waters of the North Pole attached to the nuclear submarine

By then, Vladimir Putin had already set his sights on that key region

“The Arctic not only has reserves of hydrocarbons and other raw materials;

it is also the shortest route from the west to the Pacific Ocean.

Everyone is interested in our Northern Sea Route, which will be more navigable from now on due to climate change," the Russian president said in 2013.

The naval projection is key for the Kremlin to protect these economic interests.

Although all eyes are on the Ukrainian battlefields, Moscow has recently sent out a warning in the Pacific Ocean.

The Ministry of Defense has organized massive naval exercises in the Sea of ​​Japan this week, just after its main partner today, China, carried out military exercises to rehearse a bombing attack on Taiwan.

The armed forces led by Sergei Shoigu announced this Wednesday that the Pacific fleet has had the support of eight

strategic bombers , capable of carrying both hypersonic missiles and nuclear weapons, and other aircraft that practiced anti-submarine warfare.

These military exercises were carried out around the Kuril and Sakhalin islands, claimed by Japan.

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