Putin’s revenge? Disruption of undersea cables in Baltic Sea linked to Russia’s ‘hybrid warfare’ undersea cables linked to Russia’s ‘hybrid warfare’

A day after US President Joe Biden authorised Kyiv to use a US-made long-range missile into Russian territory in the Bryansk Region, two undersea communication cables linking Lithuania and Sweden and Germany and Finland were found severed on Monday in the Baltic Sea.

While Lithuanian telecommunications company Telia claimed an undersea cable linking the country and Sweden was snapped on Sunday morning around 10 am, the disruption in a 1,200-km ‘C-Lion’ cable linking Germany and Finland was detected Monday.

Both Finland and Sweden joined NATO recently.

German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Tuesday that all clues point to sabotage as “no one believes that these cables were cut accidentally”. “We have to state, without knowing specifically who it came from, that it is a ‘hybrid’ action,” he said. “And we also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it is sabotage.”

Pistorius’s statement focuses on what regional analysts believe to be Russia’s power move: ‘Hybrid warfare’.

Germany and Finland also released a joint statement that said “European security is not only under threat from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors.” The US too, albeit in general terms, warned about “hybrid warfare”.

What is hybrid warfare?

A hybrid attack may cover a wide range of options, including sabotage campaigns, assassinations, cyberattacks, communication disruptions and arming of US adversaries.

While President Putin announced he has lowered the threshold for his country’s use of nuclear weapons in retaliation to the US move of allowing Ukraine to strike inside Russia using American missiles. Russia may have already begun hybrid warfare.

So much so that, analysts believe the repercussions of the Ukraine attack may not come directly on the battlefield but elsewhere in the world, especially in Europe.

Earlier this month, Nato secretary general Mark Rutte had openly accused Russia of intensifying its campaign of hybrid attacks that showed that the frontline in this war is no longer solely in Ukraine. “Increasingly, the frontline is moving beyond borders to the Baltic region, to western Europe, and even to the high north,” Rutte said.

Many point fingers at Russia’s alleged ‘hybrid warfare’ in connection with the 2022 hacking campaign in Estonia and the arrest of Russians with drones and cameras near oil and gas infrastructure.

There were also murder plots and conspiracies which the US and Germany suspect were the brainchilds of Russia.

These include a plot to murder European defence industry executives, including the CEO of the leading German arms manufacturer, Rheinmetall. There was another sabotage plot involving incendiary devices hidden inside planes in the UK.

Last month, MI5 head Ken McCallum said Russian GRU military intelligence was engaged in a campaign to “generate mayhem on British and European streets” using proxies that “further reduces the professionalism of their operations”.