NATO’s Baltic Sea rise reduces undersea sabotage, Western officials say

NATO’s security operation to protect critical underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea, launched several months ago, appears to be reducing sabotage incidents, Western officials told Business Insider on Friday.

“In the last six months we have had no incidents,” Commodore Arjen Warnaar, Dutch commander of NATO’s 1st Standing Maritime Group, said in an interview.

“My feeling is that we are having an effect,” he said.

Warnaar spoke aboard the Dutch warship HNLMS Johan de Witt, the flagship of SNMG1, a naval rapid reaction force of the alliance. The amphibious transport ship arrived in London on Friday, fresh from a deployment participating in NATO’s Baltic Sentry mission.

NATO announced the mission in January following several incidents involving the sabotage of critical underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea. Some malicious activity has been linked to Russia and attributed to a hybrid warfare style campaign that officials say Moscow is waging a campaign against the West.

Throughout the year, NATO warships and aircraft patrolled the region to prevent further damage from sabotage.

Although Baltic Sentry is an alliance effort, Warnaar particularly praised Baltic states like Sweden, Finland and Estonia, which have been more heavily involved in deterring sabotage given that the stakes are higher for these countries. Damage to data and communication cables has a greater effect on them.

“The hardest part is actually the legal part, and the Baltic coastal states have done a fantastic job in solving this problem,” Warnaar said. “NATO is still here. We monitor, we monitor and we report everything we see, and that’s an important function.”

Cdr. Craig Raeburn, British Chief of Staff for SNMG1, said aboard Johan de Witt that over the year NATO had increased its surveillance and response capability within Baltic Sentry.

“The response time to any type of malicious incident in the Baltic was probably about seven to eight hours before we could get any surveillance or understand what was going on,” he said. “And I think now there’s probably only an hour left.”

Raeburn said NATO uses artificial intelligence technology to analyze navigation patterns for any unusual activity, including strange turning movements, loitering and noticeable changes in speed that might be normal for a warship but not a civilian vessel.

If the AI ​​detects unusual activity, NATO commanders can quickly deploy drones, aircraft or ships to the area to investigate. Raeburn said it appears that “because we started looking and responding,” the sabotage went away.

NATO added additional assets to Baltic Sentry in late September following drone incursions on Danish military bases.

Cdr. Arlo Abrahamson, a spokesperson for NATO’s Allied Maritime Command, said at the time that the deployment of additional support and patrol assets – including multiple intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, and at least one air defense frigate – demonstrated how Baltic Sentry is a flexible mission with “more than just protecting critical underwater infrastructure.”

Baltic Sentry takes place alongside Eastern Sentry, another NATO mission aimed at protecting the alliance’s eastern border. It was launched in mid-September after European forces shot down a number of Russian drones that were violating Polish airspace.

Several countries have deployed fighter jets to Eastern Sentry to help patrol NATO airspace in recent weeks.