As Ukraine’s allies give the war-torn country clearance to use long-range weapons inside Russia, news of mysterious failures of nearby undersea internet cables surfaced.
Both of the cables are located in the Baltic Sea, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean with shores in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany.
A fault was detected in one of the cables, the Oy C-Lion1 submarine cable from Cinia between Finland and Germany, during the early morning hours Monday. This cable is around 730 miles long and is located in the Swedish Exclusive Economic Zone, east of the southern tip of Öland, connecting Central European telecommunications networks to Finland and other Nordic countries.
“The details of the fault are yet not known and are currently being investigated,” Cinia explained. “Corrective measures have been initiated and the repair vessel is getting ready to go on the site. The exact repair time is not yet known, but typically the repair time for submarine cables is between five and 15 days.”
Still, the disruption has caused concern for the nations the cable serves.
“We are deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea,” said a joint statement issued Monday by the Foreign Ministers of Finland and Germany. “The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times. A thorough investigation is underway. Our European security is not only under threat from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors. Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies.”
According to CNN, the other cable failure was one between Lithuania and Sweden. Telia Lithuania confirmed the disruption and said the cable was cut Sunday morning, per the outlet. Spokesperson Audrius Stasiulaitis explained that the disruption was “not caused by equipment failure but by physical damage to the fiber optic cable.”
That cable handled around a third of the internet capacity for Lithuana and that capacity has since been restored, said CNN. An analysis from the outlet indicated that the disrupted cables were roughly 60 to 65 miles from each other.
In September, U.S. Department of State issued a warning about undersea cable security.
“The expansion of undersea cable networks is the foundation of a more interconnected and interdependent global community, and states should adopt policies to enable efficient, robust, redundant, resilient, and secure infrastructure for network data and information flows,” said the department. It added that: “This reliance on undersea cables can, however, present major risks related to important public interests and have national and economic security implications.”
The United States also recently warned that it had detected increased Russian military activity around key undersea cables, and two U.S. officials told CNN in September “that the US believed Russia was now more likely to carry out potential sabotage operations on these critical pieces of infrastructure.”
CNN said this week’s cable failures come “amid fresh warnings of possible Russian interference with global undersea infrastructure,” and noted that two impacted countries – Finland and Sweden – have joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the past two years. NATO is an alliance of countries first formed in response to the former Soviet Union.
Today, NATO still works to deal with acts of war from the Russian Federation, including the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, though Ukraine itself is not a member. Finland and Sweden, the two countries who recently joined, also recently updated their guidance to citizens on how to survive war, and including how to handle communications outages and power cuts, CNN said.
This Sunday, the Associated Press reported that the U.S., a NATO member, authorized Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied long-range weapons inside Russia. President Biden authorized this long-standing request after North Korean troops arrived in Russia to aid in its invasion. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia plans to retaliate if Ukraine uses the weapons inside Russia.