In Asia and Europe, authorities are taking action, trying to crack down on ships taking out critical subsea infrastructure.
NATO secretary-general, Mark Rutte co-hosted a summit of Baltic Sea allies yesterday launching new military activity in the region to protect critical infrastructure following a spate of ship attacks in the Baltic on pipelines and subsea cables.
Baltic Sentry is the name of the new NATO initiative to crack down on subsea attacks, the majority of which have been carried out by merchant ships leaving Russian ports and dragging anchors.
Baltic Sentry will involve a range of assets, including frigates, maritime patrol aircraft, and drones.
Rutte stressed the importance of robust enforcement. He highlighted how Finland has demonstrated that firm action within the law is possible, recently arresting the Eagle S and its crew over a suspected cable attack.
“Ship captains must understand that potential threats to our infrastructure will have consequences, including possible boarding, impounding, and arrest,” Rutte said.
A joint statement from the heads of state or government of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden noted: “Combatting breakage of undersea cables and pipelines represents a global problem.”
The statement went on to discuss the threats posed by the growth of the shadow fleet.
“Russia’s use of the so-called shadow fleet poses a particular threat to the maritime and environmental security in the Baltic Sea region and globally. This reprehensible practice also threatens the integrity of undersea infrastructure, increases risks connected to sea-dumped chemical munitions, and significantly supports funding of Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine,” the statement read.
Further measures, including the introduction of tracking tools and the extension of sanctions targeting the shadow fleet, will be put into practice, the heads of state warned, hitting out at the “reckless activities of vessels serving Russian cargo flow”.
In Norway, meanwhile, an enterprising 24-year-old student, Jesper Johnsen Loes, has recently launched MaritimAlarm.no, a website that monitors civilian Russian ship activity in and around Norway, with the aim of uncovering potential threats to Norwegian infrastructure.
The website now also shows ships from the shadow fleet. The ships are displayed in real-time, and their position and activity can trigger alarms. An alarm is triggered if a vessel either stays within one nautical mile of infrastructure for more than one hour, or stops transmitting AIS data for more than one hour. An alarm is also triggered if a ship has a speed of 2-5 knots for more than 30 minutes.
In Asia, Taiwan has said it will step up the surveillance and management of ships carrying flags of convenience, including boarding them, after a Chinese-linked cargo vessel was recently suspected of damaging an undersea communications cable.
The Taiwanese government has said a ship owned by a Hong Kong company but registered both in Cameroon and Tanzania, damaged a cable to the north of the island earlier this month,
Taiwan’s National Security Bureau said ships which have previously been found to misreport information about them will be put on a list of ships for priority inspection at ports.
Moreover, if these ships enter within 24 nautical miles of Taiwan’s coast and are close to where undersea cables are, the coast guard will be dispatched to board them and investigate.
Other ships hanging around the Taiwanese coastline have sparked concern. For instance, the Belize-flagged Russian general cargo vessel, Vasily Shukshin, left Russia’s Vostochnyy port on December 8 and loitered off Taiwan’s coast on December 19, according to Ray Powell, director of Stanford University-affiliated maritime analyst group SeaLight.
Powell said the vessel was “aimlessly criss-crossing” the area near Taiwan’s Fangshan undersea cable landing station for three and a half weeks “for no apparent reason,” but that it had since started to return to Russia earlier this week.
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