'Shadow fleets' and sabotage: are Europe's undersea cables under attack?

The current approach, to zig-zag over a cable with the anchor, is extremely obvious, but they could just as well have an entire fleet of ships just casually drag their anchor when passing over their targeted cable until one of them catches it. With a bit of planning, a large number of unrelated ships could be over one or more cables at the time the cable snaps, making it rather difficult (and therefore expensive) to figure out which ship is behind the attack.

The value of their crude oil fleet is also rather diminished by sanctions now that they can't sell as much crude oil as they could before.

For this specific attack, the ship being forfeited would be a net win. However, for the many other sabotaged cables, that's not happening. I think Russia gladly pays a couple thousand euros a day to sabotage European communications for weeks, as well as trick European/NATO fleets to show themselves and demonstrate how they behave when they're looking for trouble.

I believe this is akin to the US flying obvious spy planes over countries at altitudes they can't stop them at even if they wanted to: a show of force, likely unrelated to how a full-on military conflict would work.

If Russia wanted to make these attacks look like an accident, they could've sent fishing ships or at least pick more believable anchor points.

Henry Kissinger: "Who do I call if I want to call Europe?"

The irony of Trump being in power is that this might just happen during his term. I really hope so.

And it's not like Europe isn't fighting back. European intelligence has been deep inside Russian networks since before the first invasion of Ukraine. From the European side, the invasion of Ukraine is a proxy war, with billions of euros spent on fighting Russia, while to Russia the war is a normal invasion with Russian (and now North Korean) troops on the ground.

The way Europe (except for Ukraine, of course) is fighting Russia mostly benefits Europe, as far as I can tell. Most of Europe's losses, so far, have been economical. Switching to a war economy to defend against Russia would probably cost more and be less effective. Until Ukraine falls, I don't see why Europe would want to change that deal.

We cannot prevent it, we can only detect it and (try to) identify who did it. The planet (some special interest areas) are constantly being monitored (satellites, surveillance drones) and when large ships are not being 'naughty' (switch of transponders) it's relatively easy to put two and two together.

As a side-note, Russia's playbook it to cause small and frequent sabotage(s). Small enough to not cause massive retaliation (i.e. it forces someone to destroy their railroad infra by causing thousands of derailments within one hour), and frequent enough to cause actual damage.

It takes a decent amount of coordination, equipment, and crew to pull off these missions.

I imagine many people on these ships aren’t getting paid that great.

By offering levels of rewards for information about what organizations are being used to funnel money and equipment into this, it might help bring some level of prosecution, as well as make the missions more difficult to operate as there will be a lot less trust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

I mean putting an officer / escort on board of each ship to make sure they're not doing anything weird would be an option, but I'm fairly sure that's against international law or anything. The issue is also that these are international waters - the Eagle went right through a narrow corridor of international waters - where it's a bit of the wild west.

This is only effective because there are no real consequences for it.

What you want is a combination of maritime patrol aircraft and offshore patrol craft. Maritime patrol aircraft (helicopter, fixed wing aircraft, UAVs) are equipped with surface search radar and other sensors that enable them to monitor a wide area. The patrol craft are also fitted with radars and sensors, and can also move to intercept a suspicious ship. A helicopter could also potentially be used for intercept

Edit: or do you mean mines anchored to the cable on the sea floor? That would make it easier to kaboom the cable instead of cutting it.

I imagine there must be some other deterrent measure but drawing a blank. My brother was the navy man...

Would you advocate the border control should point guns at anyone who crosses the border? Or is that a needless risk to the safety of humans?

I'd ask you to consider for a moment, exactly what is going to happen to that mine? I assume you thought it would damage or destroy any anchor dragged across the cable? Well it's really hard to predict how much damage it would cause but lets assume it works exactly as you hope and say it only destroys the anchor chain of the boat. What if there's a storm, and that ship can't anchor safely, but because it's run by incompetent, or evil people they don't care, and try to park near another ship crash into it. Both ships sink and a bunch of innocent people on the ship that just happened to park in the wrong place, die. That's assuming all the people on the "evil ship" were involved and weren't just hired to work delivering cargo.

You admitted it was a stupid question, but I'd like to suggest you should avoid defaulting to suggesting death and destruction. A better stupid question would be "why can't we armor the cables" instead of "why can't we hurt other people"