Nato suspects that Russia has planted explosives on critical European undersea infrastructure, based on intelligence from the companies that run oil and gas rigs, pipelines, electricity connectors and telecoms cables.
In mid-February the alliance set up a “critical undersea infrastructure co-ordination cell” led by Lieutenant General Hans-Werner Wiermann, a retired German military officer.
Amid reports of Russian espionage operations, his main mission is to find out what Russia has been up to since last autumn’s sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines shocked the alliance and panicked governments.
The unit will report to a summit of Nato leaders in July and is building an intelligence picture of the critical infrastructure. “Why is there this Russian focus on undersea offshore infrastructure? The answer is obvious,” said a Nato official involved in the work.
“If Russia attacks one of our power plants on land, that is war. If the Russians can sabotage one of our undersea pipelines or cables then — look at Nord Stream, we still do not know who did that — they can attack deniably.”
While investigations into the Nord Stream bombing continue and several theories have been suggested, there is growing evidence that links the Russian navy to the attack.
Today four Nordic public broadcasters, led by DR, Denmark’s state-owned radio and TV company, published the most detailed reconstruction of Russia’s operations in the weeks before the bombs went off.
Russian vessels, including a large hydrographic ship with a submarine on board, another submarine ship called the SS750, and the CB123 tug equipped with a robust crane, paid three visits to the vicinity of the explosion sites between June 6 and September 22, four days before the blasts.
While they had gone “dark”, which means that their position-signalling transponders were switched off, their locations could still be traced through intercepted radio traffic. Analysts said it was possible the ships had been conducting reconnaissance in the summer to prepare for a suspected sabotage operation in September.
Experts said the Sibiryakov — a hydrographic sea-surveying ship that is believed to carry a small submarine — was well-equipped for covert underwater warfare missions.
“It is a ship with underwater operating capacity that can send things down to the seabed,” said Jens Wenzel Kristoffersen, a Danish navy captain and analyst at the University of Copenhagen. “It has [submarine] equipment, a crane for lowering things into the water and a room for operating [the submarine]. It is able to locate, confirm and map what lies on the seabed.”
Moscow has used a mixture of military vessels and notionally civilian ones, such as fishing or oceanographic ships, to map potential vulnerabilities in the Baltic and North seas since the 1960s.
For more than half a century, both sides have played a game of cat and mouse, deploying sonar, radar, underwater microphones, patrol vessels and the whole gamut of espionage.
However, the war in Ukraine and the spectacular Nord Stream attack have brought home what is at stake and the lengths to which Russia is prepared to go, putting northern Europe on high alert.
Wiermann and his Nato unit are building an intelligence picture that takes in traditional spycraft, such as GCHQ, MI6 and other intelligence services, as well as bringing in the private sector and companies as Equinor, the Norwegian state-owned oil company, Shell, SSE and Siemens.
Last September, explosions destroyed three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines that connect Russia and Germany and, due to the difficulties of undersea investigations, no culprit has yet been identified.
Companies now alert the authorities to suspicious activity such as the unauthorised presence of ships and “tapping” picked up on pipeline or cable sensors. “There are strong suspicions that cables or pipelines have been mined. Companies have their own highly classified information. We have a lot of suspicions,” said the Nato official.
Brigadier General Sami Nurmi, head of defence policy at the Finnish defence ministry, acknowledged that Russia could be laying mines on undersea installations as part of “hybrid” options combining military and non-military operations. “Everything is possible. How can you detect it? I guess the only way is to have an extensive surveillance system and to know what’s happening around yourself,” he said.
“They always find new ways to do bad things if they want to do bad things. And that makes it really difficult to react to.”
Nato has standing naval groups that are scrambled if a patrol vessel or sensors on infrastructure identify a threat. The number of ships patrolling has been doubled since the Nord Stream attack.
Eleven alliance countries are taking part in the “Dynamic Mongoose” anti-submarine warfare (ASW) training in the North Atlantic.
A key element of ASW is countermining — destroying enemy mines — and Nato is developing a new class of undersea drones and systems for protecting infrastructure.
While the alliance will never have enough ships to cover Nato’s huge maritime area, new intelligence structures, drones and sensor listening posts are expected to identify suspicious activity, allowing deterrence.
“Somewhere in Moscow there are people sitting and thinking of the best ways they can to blow up our pipelines or cut our cables,” said the Nato official. “Our job is to make that a costly and futile endeavour. At least, to make it undeniable, lessening the appeal because it is then an act of war.”
Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, is particularly concerned about the threat and was one of the first to raise the alarm about the threat to undersea cables before he was in government.
Mike Hart, a recently retired air vice-marshal in the RAF, who is at the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University, said before Ukraine and Nord Stream “Russia was sort of a thing rumbling away in the background rather than a malign actor”.
“The government woke up to it,” he said. “People began to be more aware of the sheer extent of undersea infrastructure, be that energy or be that communications, and the kind of dependencies that creates. And obviously when you create a dependency, you create a potential vulnerability. It’s clearly heightened by Ukraine and the fact that there’s now this period of extended confrontation with Russia.”
According to military sources, Britain’s response includes a P8 Poseidon maritime reconnaissance aircraft from RAF Lossiemouth, which has been conducting exercises with HMS Mersey, a Royal Navy offshore patrol vessel.
The source added that the Royal Navy was soon to launch a specialised undersea protection surface vessel, not yet named, to work as “giant sensor suite that can sit and sense what is happening”. The vessel, costing £65 million, is the first of two Royal Navy “multi-role ocean surveillance ships”.
The North Sea has become a new frontline with the development over the next 25 years of offshore wind farms that will power 300 million homes and a plan to build a hydrogen processing facility on Dogger Bank.
Last autumn, the Dutch navy intercepted a Russian vessel “mapping” cables near a North Sea wind farm. Highlighting the sensitivity of such infrastructure, the UK last week signed a deal with the Netherlands for the LionLink connector, which will provide electricity for two million British households.
Britain is a world leader in offshore wind and is making big investments in the North Sea, which is nearly twice the size of its land area.
“The North Sea is effectively going to be turned into the Saudi Arabia of wind power,” said the Nato official. “That is all critical infrastructure that is going to be connected by undersea pipelines and cables that are sabotage targets.”
Nato has also identified other key “choke points”. One of them, Norway’s Troll platform, was visited by Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary general, last month. “Since these installations are so vital they are also so vulnerable,” he said.
Troll produces about 10 per cent of Europe’s gas, making it a vital link in the energy chain for European countries who have switched from Russian supplies. “If that goes down we are ******,” said a senior diplomatic source.
Alarm bells rang last year when a Russian vessel, the Yantar, set off from Murmansk in March and then promptly switched its transponder off to conceal its location.
The “oceanography” vessel is equipped with a mini-submarine capable of diving to a depth of 20,000 feet, and has been caught in the act of spying on submarine communication cables or, fear some, setting mines to sabotage them.
Other “research” vessels such as the Admiral Vladimirsky have been spotted off northern Scotland. In April, Danish broadcasters published footage of an encounter with the vessel last November which showed a man, wearing a balaclava and military gear, and carrying an assault rifle, appearing on the deck.
Professor Jonathan Holslag, at the VUB university in Brussels and the Belgian Royal Higher Institute for Defence, said: “Frankly, we don’t know what the Russians have been doing. We woke up too late.”
he got at least one good connection! Hey, its that old saying again... He ****** around, and he found out!
www.bbc.co.uk
