As undersea cables break off Europe and Taiwan, proving sabotage is tough

Al Jazeera | March 10, 2025

● Recent cases of damage to submarine cables around the island and in Europe suggest that proving sabotage may be no easy task.

● In January, NATO launched Baltic Sentry to step up surveillance of suspicious activities by ships in the Baltic Sea.

● Beijing and Moscow have denied any involvement in sabotaging undersea cables. “This is what the entire grey zone is about. It’s about being deniable,” said Ray Powell, the director of Stanford’s Sea Light project.

● Subsea cables – which crisscross the globe carrying 99 percent of intercontinental digital communications traffic – regularly suffer damage due to age, environmental changes and marine activities like fishing.

● “The simplest way for a bad actor to break a cable is to make it look like one of the accidents that commonly cause such breaks.” Kevin Frazier, a Tarbell fellow at the nonprofit Lawfare, told Al Jazeera.