A Russian spy ship has been escorted out of the Irish Sea after it entered Irish-controlled waters and patrolled an area containing critical energy and internet submarine pipelines and cables.
It was spotted on Thursday east of Dublin and south-west of the Isle of Man but Norwegian, US, French and British navy and air defence services initially observed it accompanying a Russian warship, the Admiral Golovko, through the English channel last weekend.
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Its presence has raised fresh concerns about the security of the interconnector cables that run between Ireland and the UK carrying global internet traffic from huge datacentres operated by tech companies including Google and Microsoft, which have their EU headquarters sited in Ireland.
The sighting of the Russian intelligence ship came as British defence forces monitored other Russian vessels near its eastern coastal waters. On Thursday, British jets were also scrambled to monitor a Russian reconnaissance aircraft flying close to UK airspace, the Ministry of Defence said.
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Are they maping exact cable locations so they can sever them easily later, when it suits them?
Mapping them is useful as documented potential targets, but the act of doing so, in a mixture of secrecy and obviousness pushes uncertainty into the EU as well. Russia loves to destabilize EU countries.
Or wrapping some explosives around them.
So that’s all they can do now, sabre rattling cutting an internet cable.
Weak.
It isn’t cutting the cable that is an issue, they splice in spying equipment into the cables
That’s a lot less viable with fiber
I don’t think that’s possible.
Encryption for the win!
Good luck to cut a cable like that open without it gets seen instantly too.
Out of curiosity, is that area protected by (international) law?
It’s in the Irish EEZ, which means it’s navigable waters for everyone, but the Irish can drill for oil or put down undersea cables. The “escorted away” thing legally looks like as when someone wants to break into a store and is walking around the storefront with a crowbar, and police come out and just observe and deter the likely perp until they go away.
They can’t tell the vessel to go away, but they can put a few proverbial spotlights on it so it doesn’t do things it shouldn’t be doing.
Oh, BTW, this is exactly the sort of situation that goes down again and again in China, except there the Chinese actively ram ships and endanger aircraft in their EEZ.
So, basically, it’s a moot point. But I can see the motivation of escorting the ship away. Chinese are on a different level, of course.
Undersea infrastructure was damaged in the past, so it’s not really a moot point. This is like the bobbies escorting a woman home who was being stalked after there was an uptick of rapes in the area.
No telling what might have happened if the Russians felt they weren’t being watched.
Kind of. It feels more like a guy who just looked like a rapist was escorted away. As per Russians, I’m sure they have other ways to mess with those cables if they wish to, such as submarines.
Why send submarines when you can just trawl over cables with civilian boats so no risk of retaliation basically.
“Oh whops. We forget anchor. How silly of us. Accident happen, is unfortunate.”
Telecoms cable break reported between Finland and Germany
That was yesterday. There was also another Swedish cable they broke. Oh sorry, that “broke for yet unknown reasons”.
