Russia Is Testing NATO Below the Waterline

This spring, Britain, Norway and the United States confronted a Russian undersea operation near Svalbard that Western officials believe was designed to test a method of sabotaging critical subsea cables.

According to Reuters, Russia’s Main Directorate for Deep-Sea Research, known as GUGI, used deep-sea submersibles to simulate the deployment of technology capable of disabling undersea cables while making attribution difficult. Allied forces tracked and confronted the Russian vessels, preventing them from completing the exercise. No cables were damaged.