1/4/2024 0 Comments Mr submarine menuAnother method of attack would be to deposit mines, which could be remotely activated weeks or months after they were laid. A surface ship could deploy a drone at some distance, which in turn could detonate a torpedo warhead over the target. Russia was thought to be pursuing 17 separate underwater drone projects as of 2018. It would be easier for Russia to deploy autonomous or remotely operated drones from Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave on the Baltic, which hosts the Russian navy’s Baltic Fleet and lies just 300km across the water from the area where the pipelines were damaged. Large surface motherships would also be spotted. To deploy divers, drones or torpedoes they would have to cross the North Sea and enter the Baltic, whose narrow entrance is well-suited to acoustic monitoring by NATO. Its submarines are based in the Arctic and focus on the North Atlantic, Norwegian Sea and Barents Sea. Yet GUGI is unlikely to have been the culprit in this case, argues Bryan Clark, a naval expert at the Hudson Institute, a think-tank in Washington. In 2019 a fire aboard the Losharik, one of GUGI’s mini-submarines, killed 14 Russians in the Barents Sea-that they were all officers indicated the specialist nature of the organisation’s work. They can deploy divers (known as hydronauts), mini-submarines or underwater drones. GUGI has a variety of spy ships and specialist submarines which can work at extreme depths. One threat comes from the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, known by its Russian acronym GUGI, which is separate from the navy and reports directly to the Russian ministry of defence. Russia has various means of targeting underwater infrastructure. “We are now seeing Russian underwater activity in the vicinity of undersea cables that I don’t believe we have ever seen,” warned the commander of NATO submarine forces in 2017, adding that “Russia is clearly taking an interest in NATO…undersea infrastructure.” This January the head of Britain’s armed forces noted a “phenomenal increase in Russian submarine and underwater activity” over the previous two decades, with a particular threat to cables. ![]() In recent years, Western officials have grown increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of undersea cables, which are estimated to carry 95% of the world’s international digital data. One European official says that Russia is the presumed suspect. ![]() It was “deliberate, reckless and irresponsible”, declared NATO. The cause was “apparent sabotage”, said Jake Sullivan, America’s national security adviser. It is the result of explosions which ripped through the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which carry gas from Russia to Europe, early on September 26th. A GIANT WHIRLPOOL is raging in the Baltic Sea, off the Danish island of Bornholm.
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