Oct 17

Oct 17 Beginner's 101 Guide: Silent Sabotage: The Hidden Struggle Under Europe's Seas

Foreign Affairs Forum | Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj (Dr. 🆎)

Summary

What Is Going On

A quiet but serious struggle is unfolding beneath the sea. It is not a war with armies marching or planes flying overhead. Instead, it is a contest over the cables and pipelines on the seabed that carry the internet, electricity, and gas modern life depends on.

A new book by Elisabeth Braw, The Undersea War, explains how fragile this hidden network is and why countries now worry about it.

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj (Dr. 🆎), who studies how artificial intelligence and geopolitics shape global security, says the problem is easy to ignore because nobody can see it. When a cable breaks, most people notice nothing at first. Yet behind the scenes, engineers, police, and military officers rush to find out what happened and who is responsible.

Why the Baltic Sea Matters

The Baltic Sea is the place where this struggle is most visible. It is shallow, narrow and very busy, with about two thousand ships passing through each day.

Many countries share its shores, including Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Poland and Russia. Because the water is shallow, a ship dragging its anchor can easily damage cables on the bottom.

Finland and Sweden joined NATO in 2023 and 2024, so the sea is now mostly surrounded by alliance members. Even so, it is also close to Russian ports and military bases.

This mix of crowded shipping, valuable cables, and a hostile neighbor makes the Baltic a highly sensitive region.

What Has Happened So Far

The trouble began in September 2022, when the Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up.

In October 2023, a Hong Kong-flagged ship was linked to damage to a gas pipeline and two data cables between Finland, Estonia and Sweden. In November 2024, two more cables were cut within a day, one linking Finland and Germany and another linking Lithuania and Sweden.

On Christmas Day 2024, a tanker called Eagle S was suspected of dragging its anchor and damaging an important power cable between Finland and Estonia, along with four data lines.

Finland seized the ship. On New Year's Eve 2025, Finland detained another vessel, the Fitburg, and arrested fourteen crew members.

In early January 2026, Latvian police boarded a ship after a cable between Lithuania and Latvia was damaged.

Finnish police say at least eleven cables, including one pipeline, have been cut in the Baltic over about two years.

The Shadow Fleet

Many of the ships under suspicion belong to what is called Russia's shadow fleet. This group consists of older ships with unclear owners that carry Russian oil around Western sanctions.

Estimates of its size range from about six hundred to more than three thousand vessels, because the owners hide their identities.

These ships help Russia fund its war in Ukraine. Experts also worry they could be used to monitor European infrastructure or even damage it while hiding responsibility.

Russia denies any wrongdoing and calls the accusations unfair. Finnish military intelligence has said it has not proven a direct link to Russia in the investigated cable cases. This is exactly why the problem is so hard to solve.

Why It Is So Hard to Respond

Governments struggle for several reasons.

First, proving who did what is slow and difficult. A ship can say its anchor slipped in a storm, and it can be hard to show otherwise.

Second, private companies, not governments, own most cables, so no single authority fully controls their protection.

Third, the law of the sea gives coastal countries limited power over foreign ships beyond their territorial limits, so they often release suspects.

There is also the risk of escalation.

In May 2025, a Russian fighter jet flew over a tanker that Estonia was trying to stop, and the attempt was called off.

Finland's prime minister has said that his country is not at war but is under attack. That is dangerous, because one mistake could turn a quiet struggle into an open crisis.

How NATO Is Responding

In January 2025, NATO launched a mission called Baltic Sentry. It uses warships, patrol aircraft, and naval drones to monitor the sea and the cables beneath it.

Germany, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and other members have contributed ships, aircraft and staff. The European Union has also proposed sanctions on ships in the shadow fleet.

Other countries are preparing too. France aims to build up its ability to operate on the seabed during 2026. Estonia has sent naval vessels to guard its power links.

Reports in September 2026 said allies disrupted a Russian exercise aimed at practicing cable sabotage, suggesting both sides are training for this kind of contest.

The Role of Technology

New technology is changing the contest. Sensors can turn the cables themselves into listening devices. Drones can patrol under and above the water. Satellites and computer programs can track thousands of ships and flag any that behave strangely.

Dr. 🆎 explains that artificial intelligence can help a great deal, but it can also make mistakes. A false alarm during a tense moment could cause a serious problem, so he insists that people, not machines, must make the final decisions about any forceful response.

What Should Happen Next

Dr. 🆎 and other experts suggest several steps. Allies should agree in advance on clear consequences for anyone who damages cables, so that adversaries know what to expect. Governments and companies should build more backup routes, keep repair ships and spare cable ready, and share information quickly.

Countries should also improve the rules on ship ownership and which flags they may fly, so anonymous tankers have fewer places to hide.

Finally, navies, coast guards, police, and cable companies should train together. Ordinary citizens also need to understand how much depends on the seabed, so that they support the cost of protecting it.

Conclusion

The undersea shadow war is real, even though it is mostly hidden. It tests how far one country can go without starting a war, and it shows how much modern life depends on a few thin lines on the ocean floor.

The answer is not fear but preparation: stronger networks, faster investigations, clearer rules, and careful human control over powerful technology. If allies act together, they can keep the cables working and keep the sea calm. If they do not, the shadows beneath the waves may grow darker.

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj is a polymath and veteran strategist whose career spans more than four decades of high-stakes leadership across business, public life, geopolitics, and scholarship.

He has served as president of two SAP consulting partner firms and has combined that operational record with long-form research at the intersection of technical infrastructure and human behavior. Twice a candidate for the United States Congress, he brings to his present work a practitioner’s understanding of electoral politics, legislative constraint, and the distance between policy design and public consent. That experience sharpens his reading of national division: campaigns expose how fiscal choices, institutional trust, and social psychology interact in real time, and how durable reform depends on legitimacy as much as on technical soundness.

At the center of his current practice is Strategic Country Assessment. Dr. Bhardwaj approaches the state as a diagnostician, applying a structured framework to the social, economic, and political conditions of nations. He joins fiscal analysis with social psychology to trace the origins of budget imbalance and civic fracture, and to propose systemic remedies aimed at economic stability and social cohesion. His congressional campaigns inform that method. They trained a habit of testing abstract models against voter realities, institutional incentives, and the limits of mandate—an outlook he now applies to country-level diagnosis and to advice on contested policy environments.

This work is extended by his engagement with computational epistemology: the formal structures through which machine systems represent claims, and the ways those representations meet human belief. He treats the present convergence of machine intelligence and global infrastructure—what he terms the Prometheus Protocol—as a problem of knowledge, governance, and risk, not merely of engineering.

His academic formation includes doctorates in Social Psychology and Theology, grounding his attention to collective belief, moral frameworks, and the unspoken drivers of institutional behavior. He is advancing further study toward a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. A foundation in mechanical engineering, international trade, and finance supplies the structural discipline he brings to military theory, national policy, and global maritime energy chokepoints. Parallel work on high-stakes initial public offerings gives him a direct view of capital formation, strategic competition, and the contests that shape technological and economic primacy.

As Editor-in-Chief of Washington Media and an advisor associated with United Nations forums, his commentary on state power, institutional capture, and the historical trajectories of Russia and the Gulf has become reference reading for observers of a multipolar order. Through his Selective Writings, he also argues for the vulnerable, pressing for the dismantling of structures that deny dignity and free choice.

Outside formal analysis, he remains attached to the rhythms of the natural world. An avid photographer of forests, waterfalls, and caverns, and a close observer of butterflies, he treats ecological interconnection as a standing corrective to purely instrumental views of policy and power. That sensibility is continuous with his life as a single parent—the commitment he regards as his most consequential—and with a public outlook formed in two congressional campaigns: that authority is justified only where it enlarges freedom, and that analysis which cannot survive contact with citizens is incomplete.

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