Russian trawlers logged over 500 loiterings above US-Europe undersea cables
Because cables in international waters are hard to board or seize, mapping by commercial vessels is difficult to stop without proof of Kremlin links.
Reporting from The Telegraph, relayed by Tom's Hardware, says Russian commercial fishing trawlers have been loitering over and tracing undersea cables linking North America and Europe, with more than 500 such episodes logged across roughly four and a half years. The vessel positions were drawn from Global Fishing Watch satellite tracking and compared against nautical charts showing cable routes. Among the cables cited are Atlantic Crossing 1, the retired TAT-14 line, Hibernia Express, Shefa-2 and the Amitie and Grace Hopper systems. A senior naval officer told the outlet that the trawlers are large enough to carry an uncrewed surface vehicle or a remotely operated vehicle able to map seabed features to millimetre accuracy. Analysts frame this as gray-zone activity, since the ships' links to the Kremlin are hard to prove and cables in international waters are generally beyond the reach of boarding or seizure.
Why it matters
The reporting points to a gap in how undersea infrastructure is protected: cables that carry much of the traffic between North America and Europe can be surveyed by ordinary-looking fishing boats, and the law as described gives coastal states little power to act while a vessel is only shadowing or mapping. Because the ships' ties to the Kremlin are difficult to establish, the activity sits in a gray zone where attribution and response are both unclear. For anyone who depends on these links, the story shows that the threat is less about a single dramatic event than about sustained, low-visibility observation of routes that are otherwise hard to watch.
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Sources
- Tom's Hardware