Reuters on Thursday reported some previously secret details of Russia’s failed exercise in Arctic sabotage in April, including U.S. involvement in helping the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) break up an ominous Russian training exercise with a “secret weapon” designed to destroy undersea cables.
“Britain and Norway disclosed in April that they had uncovered a covert Russian operation in Arctic waters. But the discovery of the new weapon, the location of the operation and the U.S. involvement have not been reported,” Reuters noted.
Undersea cables have become a major concern of security analysts, because they are vital to maintaining intercontinental Internet connections, but they are relatively fragile and undefended. As Reuters pointed out, most of the cables that form the backbone of the worldwide Internet are hundreds of miles long, but not much thicker than a garden hose.
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a meeting outside in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, Aug. 31, 2024. (Alexander Kazakov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
The trick for saboteurs is accessing the cables, which lie at considerable depths beneath the surface of the ocean. The target of Russia’s alarming exercise in April was a pair of cables that lie almost 9,000 feet deep in the frigid Arctic waters, connecting mainland Norway to the Svalbard archipelago near the North Pole.
Known as the Svalbard Undersea Cable System, the cables were originally laid to collect data from satellite ground stations in Svalbard for NASA but later became the primary Internet connection for residents of one of the northernmost communities in the world.
NATO forces caught three Russian submarines sniffing around the Svalbard cables in April, evidently working on some sort of covert operation in British territorial waters. British and Norwegian forces tracked the Russian subs for over a month before the British Defense Ministry publicly revealed the plot and shamed the Russians into withdrawing.
“To President Putin, I say: ‘We see you. We see your activity over our cables and our pipelines, and you should know that any attempt to damage them will not be tolerated and will have serious consequences,’” declared then-UK Defense Minister John Healey.
“Our armed forces left them in no doubt that they were being monitored, that their movements were not covert, as President Putin planned, and that their attempted secret operation had been exposed,” Healey said.
According to Healey, the Russian sub squadron included an Akula-class attack submarine and two specialized submersibles from the Russian Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research (GUGI). He said the GUGI subs were “designed to survey underwater infrastructure during peacetime, and sabotage it in conflict.”
According to the Reuters report on Thursday, those GUGI subs were packing a “secret weapon designed to disable critical undersea cables without leaving any fingerprints.” The Russians were conducting a clandestine operation to simulate the deployment of this weapon.
Two unnamed officials confirmed for the first time that the U.S. was involved in tracking and confronting the Russian subs, in addition to Britain and Norway. In addition to calling the Russians out in public, the NATO members made a point of showing the Russians they knew about the secret weapon and how it worked, in the hopes of convincing Moscow that it could not get away with using it.
“Through our joint operation, we sent a clear message to Russia that they cannot operate covertly. We have made it unequivocally clear to Russian authorities that any attempt to target our critical infrastructure will be detected and met with consequences,” Norwegian Defense Minister Tore Sandvik said on Thursday.
“It is in no one’s interest to escalate tensions in the High North,” Sandvik added.
Norway was the only involved party willing to comment on the record. The White House and CIA refused to comment, the British Defense Ministry pointed to its previous statements on the matter, and Russia is never willing to admit it has an undersea sabotage program.
The details of exactly how Russia’s cable-cutting secret weapon works are presumably still classified, but Reuters noted the increasing number of incidents over the past few years where ships “sailed slowly over or near sensitive subsea infrastructure including pipelines, power cables and telecoms cables to map their location.”
This practice, known as “drifting,” has given the world’s aggressive powers, particularly Russia and China, a detailed map of potentially vulnerable undersea cables, and there is no conceivable use for such a map except to plan sabotage. At least 11 incidents of undersea cable damage were reported between 2023 and 2025.
The size and depth of the cables makes them difficult to defend, but NATO powers have been able to reduce the number of suspicious “drifting” incidents with more surface and air patrols.
“In the last 25 years, Europe did two things simultaneously. It dramatically expanded the extent to which it relies on seabed infrastructure, and it dramatically shrunk its capacity to protect that infrastructure. It’s belatedly rebuilding now, in the face of a burgeoning Russian threat,” Brookings Institution senior fellow Bruce Jones told Reuters.
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