HIKMA SUMMIT
OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

From a technical standpoint, these systems are sophisticated but not invulnerable. A typical submarine power cable is an armoured three‑core conductor between 7 and 21 centimetres in diameter, protected by steel wire and outer sheathing; telecom cables are thinner (up to 4–5 centimetres), with optical fibres encased in polyethylene, copper and sometimes light armour. In deep water, where fishing gear does not operate, cables are simply laid on the seabed, but in coastal and shelf areas they are usually buried or covered with rock or protective mattresses to reduce the risk from trawlers and anchors. Even considering this, global statistics show roughly 150–200 cable faults a year, the vast majority accidental and caused by bottom trawling, anchoring and, less often, natural events such as submarine landslides or earthquakes. Industry bodies like the European Subsea Cables Association (ESCA) have built practical safety regimes: charts such as KIS‑ORCA to warn fishermen of cable routes, awareness campaigns, and recommended burial practices. The objective is the reduction of “background” accident rate and manage repair operations that can still take weeks or months.

What has changed in the last few years is the strategic context, and the Baltic Sea has become the emblematic theatre of this shift. The JRC notes that a cluster of recent incidents in the Baltic brought political and media attention to an infrastructure that previously attracted interest only from engineers and telecom lawyers. Bruce Jones, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, goes further and describes the Baltic as “seabed zero”: ground zero in a new contest over undersea infrastructure, from the Nord Stream pipeline explosions in 2022 to repeated damage to data cables and gas or power links in 2023–2025. These events are not isolated: they occur in shallow waters that are easy to access with relatively unsophisticated gear, along routes that concentrate both data and energy flows to northern Europe. Maritime intelligence firms and naval patrols have documented patterns of Russia‑connected vessels and submarines loitering on or near critical routes, and Jones argues that Moscow has explicitly incorporated the ability to threaten seabed infrastructure into its naval doctrine, viewing Western dependence on these links as an Achilles’ heel. The response has been the rapid deployment of new NATO capabilities such as the Baltic Sentry operation, which combines maritime patrol aircraft, surface ships and drones to watch over cables and pipelines, and national measures like Finland’s seizure of suspect vessels after cable damage incidents.

However, deterrence in this domain is complicated by the blurred line between accident and attack. The JRC emphasizes that, statistically, most damage remains unintentional, caused by unsafe seamanship, “shadow fleet” tankers anchoring in the wrong place, or fishing vessels operating too close to mapped routes. This makes it easy for hostile actors to hide deliberate sabotage behind plausible deniability, especially when investigation requires specialised surveys on the seabed and attribution is slow and probabilistic rather than immediate and conclusive. At the legal level, the international regime is antiquated. The key treaty is still the 1884 Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables, and modern peacetime protections in the law of the sea are widely seen as weak, with penalties and jurisdictional tools that do not match the strategic value of the infrastructure. Analysts point to “prosecutorial gaps” where intentional damage in international waters or exclusive economic zones falls between the cracks of flag‑state responsibility, coastal‑state interests and complex multinational ownership consortia. This is why Jones and others argue that Russia and, increasingly, China are weaponizing the grey zone at sea: exploiting legal ambiguity and the scale of the oceans to pressure Western societies without triggering the clear thresholds of armed attack.

Against this background, the policy debate has shifted from simply hardening the hardware to rethinking how to detect, deter and legally pursue harmful conduct beneath the waves. On the protection side, the JRC underlines a layered approach: more systematic burial and physical shielding of cables where feasible, continuous monitoring using AIS, radar, satellite imagery and seabed sensors, and the creation of designated offshore corridors where fishing and anchoring restrictions make it easier to spot anomalous behaviour. The EU’s 2025 Action Plan on Cable Security builds on this by tying subsea cables into broader frameworks on cybersecurity, critical entities resilience and maritime security, and by using instruments like the Connecting Europe Facility to co‑finance redundancy and alternative routes. On the deterrence side, a CSIS study argues that “detect to deter, sue to secure” should become a guiding principle: exploit advances in AI, commercial satellites and maritime domain awareness to strip away plausible deniability; then complement state sanctions and criminal law with civil litigation, insurance penalties and reputational damage for vessel operators and delinquent flag states. The idea is that if cable owners and insurers routinely pursue damages and declaratory judgements for intentional or reckless conduct, even when culprits never appear in court, the perceived cost of using ships and anchors as tools of coercion will rise.​

Taken together, these trends suggest that subsea cables have moved from the margins of specialist debate to the attention of international security thinking. They sit at the intersection of energy transition, digital dependence and great‑power rivalry, and the Baltic episodes have shown how quickly shallow waters can become strategic fault lines. For Europe in particular, the challenge is to convert emerging initiatives as the EU Action Plan, NATO’s new undersea infrastructure structures, industry‑led safety schemes into a coherent doctrine that treats the seabed as a contested space where resilience, surveillance and lawfare must work together. Whether future crises resemble careless anchor drags or deliberate sabotage, the real test will be whether governments and private operators can see them coming, attribute them credibly, and impose enough political, legal and financial costs to keep the seabed from becoming the next decisive battleground.

Fonti:

https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-explains/subsea-cables-how-vulnerable-are-they-and-can-we-protect-them_en

https://www.csis.org/analysis/protecting-subsea-cables-detect-deter-sue-secure

https://www.escaeu.org/cable-safety/

https://www.escaeu.org/articles/submarine-power-cables/

https://thebulletin.org/2026/02/seabed-zero-baltic-sabotage-and-the-global-risks-to-undersea-infrastructure/https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/10J3JM46D5B