NATO stopped a Russian cable-sabotage drill off Svalbard, Reuters reports

NATO ships and aircraft broke up a Russian undersea drill near Svalbard this spring in which Moscow's deep-sea directorate rehearsed a weapon designed to disable fibre-optic cables without leaving a clear signature, two Western officials told Reuters on Thursday.

The unit was GUGI, the Main Directorate for Deep-Sea Research, a Defence Ministry office that runs specialised submarines and submersibles. Officials said a visible Russian submarine was used as a distraction while two GUGI vehicles worked closer to the bottom. British, Norwegian and U.S. forces tracked the group and forced it to leave. The cables were not cut. The boats did not finish the exercise.

Britain and Norway disclosed in April that they had watched a covert Russian operation in Arctic waters. Then-Defence Secretary John Healey said aircraft and ships had followed three GUGI-linked submarines for about a month. Thursday's report adds three details that were not in the April statement: the target area was the Svalbard cables, the drill involved a weapon meant to leave no fingerprints, and U.S. forces took part.

Two fibre lines, each about 1,400 kilometres long, link the archipelago to mainland Norway. They run as deep as 2,700 metres. They carry traffic from SvalSat, the large satellite ground station on the islands and a node in NASA's Near Space Network. Norway plans a third cable by 2028. A cut on both existing lines would isolate SvalSat and the settlements that depend on the same route.

Norwegian Defence Minister Tore Sandvik told Reuters that Oslo and London told Moscow they knew what the exercise was for. "We have made it unequivocally clear to Russian authorities that any attempt to target our critical infrastructure will be detected and met with consequences," he said. In a separate comment he said the joint operation "sent a clear message to Russia that they cannot operate covertly." Russia's Defence Ministry did not comment. The Kremlin has denied sabotage campaigns inside NATO states.

GUGI's public record is thin by design. Open-source military studies describe the directorate as the Russian service with hulls and crews able to map, tap or cut cables at depths that ordinary repair ships cannot reach quickly. The officials who spoke to Reuters refused to describe the new tool. The point of the report is that NATO now treats it as real enough to interdict in peacetime.

The Svalbard setting is not incidental. The archipelago sits under the 1920 Svalbard Treaty, which gives Norway sovereignty and other parties commercial rights. Russia still keeps a presence at Barentsburg. This month Norwegian police boarded the Russian state ship Professor Molchanov there on a court order tied to a $4.22 billion Hague award won by Ukraine's Naftogaz over Crimea assets. Moscow called that boarding piracy. The cable drill and the ship seizure are separate files. They share a geography that is getting more crowded.

Undersea cables have been military targets since the telegraph. What is new is the combination of a specialised directorate, a claimed low-signature tool, and a rehearsal on lines that feed a NASA-linked station. NATO's answer this spring was presence: follow the boats, force them off, then tell Moscow the rehearsal was seen. The next test is whether that sequence still works if the next group arrives in winter ice, or if the tool is used on a cable that is not next to a Norwegian patrol track.