When America's Allies Have Undersea Cables Severed, Suspicion Falls on Russia and China
By Mithil Aggarwal, NBC News
January 14, 2025
HONG KONG — First the Baltics, now Taiwan. This month, in the latest in a spate of such incidents, crucial undersea cables connecting U.S. allies were damaged or severed.
Some have been cast as acts of sabotage, pinning blame on Russia and China amid heightened geopolitical tensions.
Early this month, Taiwan’s coast guard said it had intercepted the Xing Shun 39 — a Hong Kong-owned freighter carrying the Cameroonian and Tanzanian flags — after Taiwan’s biggest telecom company, Chunghwa Telecom, alerted authorities that an international undersea cable had been damaged on Jan. 3.
A “preliminary assessment” suggested the damage might have been caused by the freighter, which “transited the area at the time of the incident,” the coast guard said.
With an average of about 200 cable faults a year, according to the International Cable Protection Committee, damage to undersea communications infrastructure is not uncommon. The majority are caused by ship anchors or fishing activity such as trawling, where heavy equipment is dragged across the seafloor.
But the Taiwanese government says this may have been an example of Chinese “gray-zone interference,” irregular military and nonmilitary tactics that aim to wear down an opponent without engaging in an actual shooting war.
It also comes amid an uproar in Europe, where NATO is stepping up patrols of Baltic Sea cables that provide power and enable almost all intercontinental communication, including the internet.
In Helsinki on Tuesday, members of the defense bloc with access to the Baltic Sea agreed at a summit on regional security threats — including Russian cable sabotage — to deploy frigates, patrol aircraft and naval drones in the Baltic Sea to help protect critical infrastructure.
NATO members said they reserved the right to take action against ships suspected of posing a security threat as part of a broader action, dubbed “Baltic Sentry,” in response to a string of incidents in which power cables, telecom links and gas pipelines have been damaged in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The damage from the Jan. 3 incident did not disrupt communications in Taiwan, as the data was routed to other cables.