Russia rehearsed how to disable Britain’s undersea cables, expert warns

Speaking exclusively to LBC, Verineia Codrean, Head of Strategy at EUROATLAS, said the latest Russian operation in the Arctic represented a significant escalation from surveillance of Western infrastructure to the apparent testing of methods designed to take it offline.

“We’ve been warning for years now about the threat posed by Russia to the UK’s undersea infrastructure, in the face of repeated provocations and warning signs,” she told LBC.

“This latest incident further underscores that. What’s significant is not just that Russian vessels were operating near critical infrastructure, they were rehearsing how to disable that infrastructure.”

Britain, working alongside American and Norwegian forces, disrupted a secret Russian operation close to the Svalbard archipelago in the spring, where vessels linked to Moscow’s highly secretive Gugi deep-sea warfare directorate were allegedly testing a new capability designed to disable subsea cables.

Western officials said British, US and Norwegian forces tracked the Russian vessels before confronting them, preventing the test from being completed and forcing them away.

The Ministry of Defence has declined to comment on the operation, while Russia has consistently denied carrying out sabotage operations against Nato countries.

But Codrean warned the incident should be viewed as part of Russia’s wider campaign of grey-zone activity across Europe, with the seabed offering Moscow an environment in which hostile operations can remain exceptionally difficult to detect or attribute.

“Russia is engaging in greyzone warfare across Europe and the UK’s critical infrastructure is a prime target, especially in places like the seabed where there is little visibility and the network of infrastructure is so vast that persistent monitoring is extremely difficult,” she said.

“While the UK, alongside the US and Norway, stopped the threat this time, under the sea is still the best place to hide.

“NATO now appears to have evidence of what appears to be rehearsal of a capability. The challenge is if we can detect the next attempt early enough to stop it and attribute it to Russia.”

The warning goes to the heart of a growing concern across Whitehall and Nato: that a future attack on Britain may not begin with missiles or troops, but with deliberately ambiguous sabotage against infrastructure the country depends on every day.

Undersea cables carry almost all international internet and telecommunications traffic entering and leaving Britain, connecting everything from banking and financial markets to government systems, businesses and everyday communications.

Codrean told LBC around 60 cables connect Britain to the outside world and carry roughly 99 per cent of the country’s international data and internet traffic.

“It’s hard to overstate how much of a vulnerability these cables are,” she said.

“While the UK has a degree of resilience if one cable is cut, there are questions about the country’s ability to withstand a larger, coordinated sabotage operation across multiple pieces of infrastructure and how long it would take to repair the damage.”

She added: “Without adequate undersea defence and surveillance, the UK leaves itself with a weakness. The brazenness of this latest plot just proves the urgency of fixing that vulnerability, and building undersea defence that is persistent and not just reactive.”

The warning follows repeated concerns from MPs and defence experts that Britain has failed to move quickly enough to protect the infrastructure running across the seabed.

A cross-party report by Parliament’s Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy previously warned that the UK’s undersea internet cable network represented a strategic vulnerability during a crisis, criticising the Government’s preparations and calling for a “more muscular deterrence” against hostile activity.

While the committee found there was no imminent threat to Britain’s national connectivity, it warned it was “not confident that the UK could prevent such attacks or recover within an acceptable time period” if Russian aggression escalated rapidly.

The possible consequences extend far beyond losing an internet connection.

MPs and peers warned that a large-scale attack could disrupt payment systems and supply chains, degrade communications, place additional pressure on emergency services and cause cascading failures across services that rely on online authentication and data.

The committee also called for Britain to acquire its own cable repair ship by 2030 and for the Royal Navy to establish a group of reservists and serving personnel trained in cable repair, giving the UK sovereign repair capability during a conflict.

LBC has previously reported warnings to the Commons Defence Committee that the UK is effectively already on the “front line” of Russia’s undersea campaign.

Professor Peter Roberts told MPs that Britain hosts 119 data cables, with around $17 trillion worth of trade passing through UK data cables each day, describing the country as a gateway between Europe and the United States.

Experts warned that around 42,000 kilometres of undersea cables run through UK waters and that, away from the coast, much of that infrastructure has virtually no physical protection.

“The seabed is becoming a battlefield in a way we haven’t seen before,” former Royal Navy commodore John Aitken told MPs, as witnesses warned Russia was already using submarines and deep-sea platforms as part of a broader hybrid warfare campaign designed to operate below the threshold of conventional conflict.

The operation near Svalbard will add to fears that Russia is moving beyond simply mapping and monitoring Western infrastructure and is now testing how it could be disrupted.

It will also put fresh pressure on the Government over Britain’s undersea defences, with thousands of miles of cables lying beneath UK waters and experts warning that keeping watch over all of them is simply not possible.