Russian ships roam the North Sea to plan sabotage of key infrastructure

Russia is spending a decade secret espionage activities in the waters of the North Sea and the Baltic to discover what lies at the bottom of the sea and how key infrastructures in the West are connected. The aim is to plan sabotage against the Nordic countries, such as cutting the power and data cables that run across the Atlantic and those connecting them to the rest of Europe, in the face of a possible outright war with NATO. This is the main conclusion report of the press team surveys of the public broadcasting corporations of Norway (NRK), Denmark (DR), Sweden (SVT) and Finland (YLE), called the shadow of war.

Over the past ten years, a hundred military and civilian vessels — from fishing boats to cargo ships and yachts — have mapped offshore wind farms, gas pipelines and energy and internet cables stretched across the seabed in the waters of Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden. These ghost ships turn off their automatic identification (AIS) transmitters and therefore do not share their locations and disappear from radar.

An example is Russian warship Admiral Vladimirski, which officially conducts sea research. When DR journalists were able to locate him last November near the Kattegat, between Denmark and Sweden, and approached him in a rubber boat, they saw men with covered faces coming on deck, including one in uniform, wearing a bulletproof vest and armed rifle. military.

“We can do no more than keep them under surveillance,” complains the Swedish Navy in statements to the SVT channel. Swedish Navy Press Officer Jimmie Adamsson points out that it is crucial that Russia uses civilian vessels for camouflage, as military vessels need special permits to enter each country’s territorial waters. For the Danish newspaper DR, “Russia is fighting hybrid warfare in the Nordic countries trying to undermine democracy.”

This information once again casts doubt on what could have happened at the end of September 2022, when a series of explosions in the Baltic Sea destroyed part of the Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline. While Moscow insists on blaming foreign powers, the West reiterates that it was a maneuver of self-sabotage.