The Submarine Cable That Russia Can Cut at Any Time — And Why It Hasn't

Several North Sea and Baltic Sea submarine cables that carry European internet traffic pass through areas where Russian vessels operate. Here is why they haven't been cut and what happens if they are.

The Baltic and North Sea seabed contains some of the most concentrated submarine communications cable infrastructure in the world. These cables — dozens of them, carrying the overwhelming majority of internet and communications traffic between Northern European countries and across the North Atlantic to North America — are both extraordinarily valuable and extraordinarily vulnerable to physical interference.

Russian naval vessels, research ships, and fishing vessels with apparent intelligence-gathering functions operate in the Baltic and North Sea regularly. NATO intelligence agencies have tracked numerous incidents in which Russian vessels have moved slowly over or near submarine cable routes in what analysts describe as cable-mapping behaviour — establishing precise location data that would facilitate future interdiction operations.

The question of why Russia has not cut these cables — given that doing so would cause massive disruption to European communications and economies and would be very difficult to attribute and punish under existing international law frameworks — has several answers that exist simultaneously.

First, cable cuts are not untraceable. The combination of seabed monitoring systems, vessel tracking, acoustic monitoring, and intelligence from multiple sources means that attribution confidence would be high even if legal proof meeting court standards would be difficult.

Second, cutting cables would be a significant escalation that would risk triggering NATO Article 5 collective defense responses — something Russia has been careful to avoid since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Third, the economic damage from cable cuts would affect the global internet in ways that harm Russian interests along with Western ones.

Fourth — and perhaps most importantly — the threat value of the capability may be more useful than the capability itself. Russia's documented ability to interfere with submarine cables is most powerful as an implicit threat that constrains Western decision-making, not as an action that would be taken and then be done.