Russian Tanker Accused of Severing Undersea Cables

In the ever escalating attacks against undersea critical infrastructure such as power cables, Internet cables and oil pipelines, the battle continues to heat up.

You may remember the Nordstream pipelines between Russia and Europe that were disabled by explosions against the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines in 2022. Given the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia and other attacks against the pipelines, Russia is not making any money from these pipelines because of this. As a result, the have to use tankers to move their sanctioned oil, at much higher cost. Ref: Atlantic Council

One might suspect, in retaliation, Russian ships have been damaging undersea cables. Russia, of course, is not admitting this, but suspicions are rampant.

A month ago a critical underwater cable linking Finland to Germany via the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic sea, was cut. While the countries were able to reroute traffic, that capacity is limited.

Finland sent out a repair ship, which requires divers to find the pieces of the severed cable and splice them back together. This typically takes weeks, if you have priority; months otherwise. Credit: Reddit

Is Russia just being a nuisance? Or are they testing the response to isolated incidents? Is this a forerunner to a more massive attack? All good questions.

What is definitely true is that counties in the region are on high alert.

Today Finnish police boarded an oil tanker suspected of rupturing telecommunications and electricity cables on Christmas day.

One “technique” for destroying these cables is by dragging a ship’s anchor on the ocean floor, snagging the cables. You keep pulling until the cables snap.

The tanker, the Eagle S, was “escorted” into Finnish waters as part of a criminal investigation. For the ship’s owner, this causes delays in delivering product, maintaining crew and paying damages to the customer who is expecting the tanker’s cargo. All bad for business.

Finnish border guards discovered the ship lacked an anchor. Curious, huh?

The Finnish national electricity transmission grid operator said that they are ready to tap into reserve power and fire up backup power plants to make up for the damage. Also severed were four telecommunications cables.

As is often the case, the tanker is registered in third-party countries. In this case, the Cook Islands, and operated by a United Arab Emirates company.

The European Commission said the Eagle S forms part of a Russian “shadow fleet” of typically aged and uninsured vessels with uncertain ownership who transport embargoed goods.

The interesting part of this is that Finland was able, due to their high level of alert, to catch the culprit pretty much in the moment. They also had sufficient maritime assets in place to “encourage” the tanker to enter Finnish waters (as in, cooperate with us or we will sink you or disable you) to make it easier to launch an investigation.

It is likely that the crew does not know much, but sometimes there are incriminating documents on board.

What is still an open question is how far Russia is willing to go; how much chaos and damage they are willing to inflict. They may be trying to see how much pain they can cause without any of the countries involved escalating things.

The tanker can carry up to 74 thousand tons of Russian oil or roughly 500,000 barrels of oil. If you use today’s price of a barrel of Brent crude as a value estimator, at $72 a barrel, the cargo is worth, roughly, at retail, about $36 million.

If European countries increase their level of intervention, it could have an impact on Russia’s shadow revenue stream. In addition, if the tanker operators see more risk in carrying Russian oil, they will either increase what they charge Russia for the job or, alternatively, look for safer transport gigs.

This is likely not the end of this attack vector and it could get more confrontational, depending on what is going on in Putin’s deranged mind.

Credit: Data Breach Today

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