Meanwhile, reported that Nato allies interrupted a Russian plot training to unleash a secret weapon designed to disable critical undersea cables without leaving any fingerprints. Two 1,400 km subsea fiber-optic cables linking Svalbard to mainland Norway lie as deep as 2,700 metres below the sea’s surface. They carry vast amounts of satellite data downloaded at the SvalSat satellite ground station, the world’s largest and part of NASA’s Near Space Network.
The clandestine Russian operation looking to disable them was reportedly discovered and interrupted by Nato allies Britain, Norway and the US earlier this spring, when they tracked and confronted the Russian vessels at sea. Russia didn’t damage any cables. The exercise focused on simulating the deployment of the technology in the event of a conflict with Nato, the officials said.
They declined to detail how the technology works. Britain and Norway disclosed in April that they had uncovered a covert Russian operation in Arctic waters. But the discovery of the new weapon, the location of the operation and the US involvement have not been reported.
The Kremlin consistently denies conducting sabotage operations in Nato countries or plotting any confrontation.
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