Russia Cutting Cables? Who’s Protecting It?
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Russia Cutting Cables? Who’s Protecting It?
The headlines say Russia’s shadow fleet is cutting cables. The experts say most faults come from clumsy ship anchors. Ninety-nine percent of global internet traffic runs across the ocean floor, and the conversation about what threatens it is mostly wrong. Ernst Noorman, Cyber Ambassador at Large for the Netherlands and member of the ITU Advisory Board on Submarine Cable Resilience, joins Peter van Burgel, CEO of AMS-IX, to replace the geopolitical noise with facts.
What emerges is more nuanced than the headlines suggest, and in some ways more alarming. The cables themselves are resilient. The repair infrastructure is not. The permitting regimes are slow. The new cables are being built by big tech on big tech terms. And NIS2 just made the CEO personally accountable for understanding all of it.
What you’ll learn
- The sabotage narrative is mostly wrong. The ICPC has tracked cable faults since 1958: roughly 150 to 200 per year, and the data shows anchors, fishing nets, and natural events cause the vast majority, not state actors.
- Repair is the real vulnerability. Aging cable ships, cabotage laws, and multi-year permitting processes mean a broken cable in the wrong jurisdiction can take more than two years to fix.
- Satellite cannot fill the gap. Starlink is a lifeline for isolated regions and conflict zones, but the data volume flowing through subsea fiber cannot be matched by any satellite constellation today.
- Big tech is building the internet’s backbone on its own terms. Most new cables are now laid by hyperscalers who require a new data center as the price of a new connection. Digital sovereignty means looking at the full stack, cables included.
Your cybersecurity experts
Peter van Burgel
CEO
AMS-IX
Ernst Noorman
Ambassador for Cyber Affairs
Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Episode details
The number that recalibrates the whole conversation is 150 to 200. That is how many cable faults occur globally per year, a figure that has stayed roughly constant even as the total cable network grew from one million kilometers in 2014 to 1.7 million a decade later. The ratio is improving, not worsening. That context matters when the same news cycle frames “shadow fleet cuts Baltic cable” as a geopolitical crisis. Ernst Noorman’s advisory board was created precisely to separate the political noise from the engineering reality: the incidents are real, but they are mostly anchors, fishing nets, and underwater landslides, not sabotage.
The more urgent concern is repair, not attack. Cable ships are aging. The legal architecture around maritime repair is a patchwork of cabotage laws, national permits, and import duties that can delay a repair by months or, in documented cases, more than two years. The Netherlands, the UK, and South Africa operate on an open-permit model that lets repair ships into their waters without prior authorization. Most of the world does not. The friction is not glamorous. It is also the part of this story that actually determines how long connectivity stays degraded.
Satellite comes up in every submarine cable conversation, and the answer is consistent. Starlink is a genuine lifeline for isolated regions, for conflict zones where civilian infrastructure is destroyed, and for connectivity gaps in the Pacific and Caribbean. It cannot match the data throughput of subsea fiber. And it is subject to the decisions of whoever controls the constellation: this episode addresses directly the moment when Starlink coverage in Ukraine was switched on and off by a single private-sector call. The dependency risk is not different in kind from cable risk. It is different in whose hands it sits.
The third concern is digital sovereignty. Most new cables today are laid by hyperscalers, and those hyperscalers build cables where they want to put data centers. Countries that want new connectivity must accept the terms that come with it. NIS2 puts the CEO personally accountable for organizational cybersecurity resilience, which has changed boardroom conversations faster than any awareness campaign. For large organizations with operations in poorly connected regions, the submarine cable picture is now a board-level risk, not an infrastructure footnote.
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