Attempts to project dominance over the Baltic Sea have recurred for hundreds of years, as rival states have vied with one another over economic and military supremacy. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, the Baltic has again become a conflict zone. After the collapse of German Democratic Republic in 1989 and the reunification of Germany the next year; and the accession of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to NATO during the 1990s and early 2000s, followed by the accession of Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024, the Baltic has been – nearly – encircled by NATO. But for Russia.
A tiny Russian exclave, Kaliningrad, fronts onto the Baltic, while Russia itself enjoys direct access via three additional ports located on the Gulf of Finland: Primorsk, Ust-Luga and St. Petersburg. Even as the US has sanctioned Russia’s fuel exports, supplies of Russian oil and liquified natural gas are being shipped across the Baltic to varied destinations.[1]
This contributes to making this sea one of the world’s busiest waterways, with 70,000 vessels sailing annually through the Oresund – the strait at the western end of the Baltic between Denmark and Sweden, through which ships then pass into the North Sea and ultimately into the Atlantic Ocean.[2] The combination of NATO oversight, heightened US policing of submarine cables across the world,[3] and Russian fuel shipments is turning the shallow Baltic into a fraught zone.
Indeed, the drama over undersea cables has recently become intense. Somewhere in the world, two to four undersea cables break every week, on average – usually because of ships’ anchors, fishing gear, or natural disasters.[4] Reports have circulated during recent months, however, purporting to trace at least four cable breaks in the Baltic back to sabotage. Given the world’s dependence on undersea cables to carry everything from social media messages to enormous financial transfers, these outages have been heavily publicized.
In each case, NATO countries have blamed Russia or China. Finland and Germany have separately detained and boarded ships they suspect of deliberately damaging data and power cables with their anchors; a Norwegian military university researcher has pronounced that the cable infrastructure “presents an attractive target” and that there are credible accounts of sabotage around the world[5]; Germany’s defense minister leveled a charge of “hybrid” warfare against Russia.[6] NATO itself quickly assembled military assets to protect the seabed infrastructure under a new program called Baltic Sentry.[7]
However, did these incidents actually testify to a threat mounted by adversaries – or were they more routine cable-breaks? US intelligence officials asserted late in November 2024 that the two cable cuts reported by then were not deliberate acts, though European authorities had not discounted sabotage.[8] Despite the additional two ruptures since then, uncertainty remains. The Washington Post reported on January 19, 2025 that several senior US and European intelligence officials believed that the cables had been severed by accident. Investigations by the US and a half-dozen European security services had turned up “no indication” that commercial ships suspected of dragging their anchors across seabed cables had done so intentionally – let alone at Moscow’s behest. “Instead,” the Post related, “U.S. and European officials said that the evidence gathered to date – including intercepted communications and other classified intelligence – points to accidents caused by inexperienced crews serving aboard poorly maintained vessels.”[9] In other words, business as usual.
Despite this, NATO has mobilized to create a new power complex to monitor and repel perceived threats to the Baltic Sea’s cable infrastructure. And so the US struggle to control global communications expands, now into northern latitudes.
[1] Vaibhav Raghunandan and Petras Katinas, “December 2024-Monthly Analysis of Russian Fossil Fuel Exports and Sanctions,” Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, January 10, 202; Malte Humpert, “Russia’s Gazprom Sends Baltic LNG Through Arctic Avoiding Africa Detour,” gCaptain, September 10, 2024.
[2] Michael North, The Baltic: A History (Cambridge: Harvard, 2015), 320-21; Elisabeth Braw, “Russia’s Shadow Fleet Is Putting Danish Waters in Danger,” Foreign Policy, March 26, 2024,
[3] Winston Qiu, “US and its Allies Issue Joint Statement on the Security and Resilience of Undersea Cables,” Submarine Cable Networks, October 7, 2024.
[4] Lane Burdette, “What To Know About Submarine Cable Breaks,” Telegeography, November 21, 2024.
[5] James Glanz, Elian Peltier and Pablo Robles, “Undersea Surgeons,” New York Times, November 29, 2024; Baltic Sea could be deliberate act: Norwegian premier,” Anadolu Agency 30 December 2024; Melissa Eddy and Johanna Lemola, ”Severing of Baltic Sea Cables Was ‘Sabotage,’ Germany Says,” New York Times, November 19, 2024.
[7] Julian Borger, “NATO flotilla assembles off Estonia to protect undersea cables in Baltic Sea,” The Guardian, January 19, 2025.
[8] James Glanz, Elian Peltier and Pablo Robles, “Undersea Surgeons,” New York Times, November 29, 2024; also, see Max Colchester and Bojan Pancevski, “The Deep-Sea Battle Over the World’s Data Cables Is Heating Up,” Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2025; Richard Milne, “Baltic Sea data cable damaged in latest case of potential sabotage,” Financial Times, January 26, 2025.
[9] Greg Miller, Robyn Dixon and Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Accidents, not Russian Sabotage, behind undersea cable damage, officials say,” Washington Post, January 19, 2025.
