It probably has the long term cost of making us more willing to invest in defence though.
Investing in Ukraine's ability to deal with Russia is clearly the most economical way to deal with Russia for everyone else. Hence they want to distract us from that.
Spend - to give money as a payment for something.
Invest still sounds to me like the word I'm looking for.
Paying military subcontractors is not putting resources into improving the military, it's spending. Be it bombing a country for no profit (like Afghanistan), for resources (like Irak), or geopolitics gain (like Syria/Ukraine), it's an expense, not an inversion. The military will not get ROI from oil or geopolitics.
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/four-rheinmetall-plants-set-... for example.
"What is hybrid warfare? – Kilcullen's theory about liminal maneuver" by "Anders Puck Nielsen, an officer and military analyst at the Danish Defence Academy, specializes in Russia, Ukraine, and maritime operations."
Now you might say "...but these cables are so low value", but these are easy targets that reduce the resilience of the Baltic states. Any more conventional attack would now be more effective because they've taken the backups out first.
So, annoyance at most.
To adapt the old saying, the internet interprets cut cables as unreachable intermediate nodes and routes around them.
Sure, in aggregate lots of technologies are critically important to modern society. But you don't cry when a single rail car gets damaged.
Or they're just being bullies, or testing willingness to defend. At this point, I'd assume it's some type of aggression, at least. Unless cables have been cut all the time, but now suddenly it's becoming headlines for political reasons...
If we're talking about the Chinese state, I'd say it's viable. Perhaps not breaking AES 256 outright, but screwed up implementations of cryptography. And perhaps even backdoors.