BELFAST — The UK’s top naval official has admitted NATO nations are struggling to deal with how to address attacks on Undersea cables and connectors, because rights of ownership and international maritime conventions are complicating the matter.

Adm. Ben Key, first sea lord of the Royal Navy, said during a conversation with the Center for Strategic and International Studies thinktank on Tuesday that because undersea cables sending data across the Atlantic or Pacific oceans move across “territory that is owned by everybody,” careful steps by “like minded nations” need to be taken to protect their economic interests.

His comments came hours after Sweden stated that an undersea telecommunications cable between Sweden and Estonia had been damaged. The incident is the second of its kind in the Nordic region, arriving after an underwater natural gas pipeline was also damaged between Finland and Estonia.

Sweden’s Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said that the two incidents appear to have happened at the same time, but added that the cause of the telecommunications cable damage has not yet been determined, according to The Guardian.

Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation said in a Tuesday statement that the Chinese Newnew Polarbear container ship and Russian Sevmorput nuclear powered cargo ship are among a number of vessels under investigation as the countries seek to discover the cause of the Finnish-Estonian gas pipeline incident. The vessels have been included in the investigation because “open sources” determined they were “in the area at the time of the damage.”

Key said the causes of the Estonian incidents “are not yet fully understood,” but he stressed more generally, “we’re exploring a whole area [seabed warfare] which we don’t fully understand at the moment in terms of the solution space, because when we first put together the United Nations Convention for war on the sea, for instance, it was very much focused on what happens on the surface of the sea.”

The problem is compounded because “most” seabed cables are on the “high seas and therefore on land that is owned by nobody,” he added.

“The response for us now, as militaries and maritime communities, is to work out how we work together best in order to deliver [better security].”

Pointing to progress made by the Royal Navy to counter undersea threats, he noted that Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) Proteus, the UK’s first ship designed for underwater surveillance, recently entered service. The 6,000-tonne vessel will operate as a “launchpad” for remotely-operated vehicles, as part of the Royal Navy’s Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance (MROS) program.

Additionally, the multinational Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), led by the UK to address security issues across Europe’s High North, could provide “some agility in the sub threshold space,” according to Key.

Such an approach echoes recent actions by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to tackle hybrid threats through increased cooperation with European leaders, and his decision to deploy 20,000 UK troops to Northern Europe next year.

As part of a first phase fall deployment, the UK’s Carrier Strike Group also completed a series of simulated missions in the North Sea and Norwegian Sea earlier this month, involving suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) and strike attacks, according to the Royal Navy.

The new political and military maneuvering by the UK across Northern Europe has been shaped by Russia’s war in Ukraine, with Key forecasting that in the near-term Moscow’s strategy across the region will largely focus on hybrid warfare and attempt to “deliver some sort of impact that destabilizes confidence in ourselves.”

He said that the Russian underwater research program, otherwise referred to as the Main Directorate of Deep Research or GUGI is “alive and well,” and suggested Moscow still has a “considerable number of tools” with which to attack adversaries.

Based on damage inflicted by Ukraine on the Russian Army however, Key said that “anything that looks like a sort of territorial push [by Russia] across the border into Europe” will not arrive in the “next few years,” though noted that maritime capabilities tell a different story.

“I see nothing that’s going on in the Russian naval maritime forces at the moment that tells me that they have significantly degraded their major capabilities,” he explained. “Their nuclear submarine fleet has not been affected by what’s gone on… long range aviation squadrons have not been affected by the war.”

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