Russian ships spying on North Sea infrastructure

Non-military Russian ships have been spying on pipelines and cables in the North Sea for years, and it is happening on a much larger scale than was previously known, the Belgian newspaper De Tijd wrote based on research it conducted with Follow the Money (FTM).

According to De Tijd and FTM, 167 non-military Russian ships have carried out 945 suspicious actions near critical infrastructure in the North Sea over the past ten years. It involved research vessels, cargo ships, refrigerated ships, tankers, fishing boats, and even passenger vehicles.

The “suspicious actions” happened in the economic zones of the North Sea countries Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Norway. The Russian ships always got within a kilometer of pipes and cables and lingered there.

“Deviating sailing patterns are not necessarily suspicious. On the contrary, that happens very often, even with non-Russian ships,” Thomas De Spiegelaere, spokesperson for the Directorate General of Shipping, told De Tijd. “But it is suspicious if that happens above pipelines and cables.” There are many concerns in Europe about Russia targeting cables and pipes on the seabed for sabotage, tapping, or manipulation.

“It is absolutely true that our underwater infrastructure has not been properly monitored for years. Until recently, that was never a priority in terms of security,” De Spiegelaere acknowledged. “We never thought that those pipes and cables could be sabotaged.” He added that the military has been more attentive to this since 2019, especially after the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in 2022.

“No sabotage has been detected on Belgian or Dutch cables,” De Spiegelaere said. “But explosives have been found on a British cable at the beginning of the Ukraine crisis.”