Shadowing Russian hybrid warfare ships in the Baltic Sea
The cutting of underway cables in Europe indicate a shadow war between Russia and NATO is already underway. We joined a Lithuanian naval patrol seeking to push back against Russia’s tricks.
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Eyes fixed on the gray horizon, 20-year-old Eric stands on the deck of the Jotvingis, the flagship of the Lithuanian navy.
The salty air lashes his youthful face. His gaze remains motionless. Covered by a thick white fog, the Baltic Sea looks frozen.
Eric’s daily task is to scan the waters in the immediate vicinity of the ship, spotting suspicious movements or anomalies in the environment.
“I joined up mainly because I had poor grades at school, to be honest,” he said with a wry smile. He paused for a moment, before changing his story slightly: “In reality, what prompted me to sign up was the current context,” he said, adding that the threat is “palpable”.
“The threat is very high. We continue to monitor suspicious Russian vessels.” Eric’s voice is almost nervous. “It's been seven months since I joined and it hasn't stopped.”

In the Baltic Sea, NATO navies are on high alert, monitoring the escalating hybrid war between the West and Russia. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Baltic has become a hot spot for maritime tensions. Recent events, including the breaking of submarine cables and damage to power lines, underline the real and present danger posed by Russia's hybrid warfare tactics.
By targeting critical infrastructure, Russia aims to sow discord, fear, and uncertainty among Western allies, potentially undermining their unity and resolve in supporting Ukraine and opposing Russian aggression.
Furthermore, these incidents highlight the increasing vulnerability of digital and energy infrastructure in modern warfare, forcing NATO and its allies to reconsider their defense strategies and invest in protecting these crucial assets.

Since 2022, “we often go out to sea,” explained Eric.
Each outing is a confrontation with the unknown, and a hunt for suspicious signals – boats emitting unusual radio frequencies, or suddenly changing course.
This intensification of operations reflects a wider reality: escalating tensions between Russia and NATO countries. Underwater drone incursions, cyber-attacks on port infrastructure and tense exchanges in international waters have become commonplace.
On board the Jotvingis, the atmosphere is one of concentration. On the upper deck of the ship, officers scan the radar screens relentlessly. Monitor beams regularly scan the horizon, updating every three seconds. The crew of 50 sailors, including Eric, is focused on a slow, methodical mission: to detect and monitor any abnormal behavior in the Baltic Sea.

The ship's commanding officer, Captain Arunas, described the hunt while observing the horizon. “It's simple, Russian ships or those of the shadow fleet hardly ever switch on their AIS [Automatic Identification System],” he said. “It's up to us to find them.”
On the command bridge, every inch is occupied by screens, charts and navigation instruments. Here, officers scrutinize the slightest signals and monitor the data collected in real time.
According to Admiral Giedrius Premeneckas, Commander of the Lithuanian Navy, the ship’s work is part of a wider international effort.
“Our main role and duty at sea is to gather information about what's going on,” he said. “To get a complete picture of the Baltic Sea and share this information with NATO countries.”
This mission is far from routine:
“Obviously, with the incidents occurring in the Baltic Sea, we are more mobilized because of the increased risk of hybrid attacks against critical underwater infrastructures,” explained Premeneckas.
A Hybrid War
A shallow sea bordered by nine countries, the Baltic Sea is criss-crossed by electrical and communications cables. Before the start of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine, cable sabotage was not thought to be a serious issue in the sea.

But by September 2024, the United States had warned of an increased risk of Russian “sabotage” targeting key infrastructure. Two US officials told CNN that “Russia was now more likely to conduct potential sabotage operations aimed at disabling critical elements of communications infrastructure”.
These fears were confirmed on November 17, 2024, when the Arelion cable linking Lithuania to the island of Gotland in Sweden was severed. The following day, the C-Lion1 cable, linking the Finnish island of Santahamina to Rostock in Germany, suffered the same fate.
Although investigations are still underway, German and Finnish authorities were quick to point to probable sabotage. The German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, stressed that the almost simultaneous rupture of these cables could “not be a coincidence,” referring to the hybrid threat of Russian origin.

On December 25, the Estlink 2 power cable, linking Finland to Estonia, suffered damage that reduced its capacity from 1,016 to 358 megawatts. Fingrid, the Finnish operator, estimates that repairs will take several months. At the same time, four undersea telecommunications cables were also damaged.
The Finnish authorities suspected the oil tanker Eagle S, which was on the scene at the time. They boarded it in order to investigate.
Eagle S has international pedigree. The vessel is registered in the Cook Islands, and owned by a United Arab Emirates company, but operated by an Indian company called Peninsular Maritime.
It is part of Russia's “shadow fleet”, which transports oil under foreign flags, providing revenue for Moscow by circumventing international sanctions.
Ships in Russia's “shadow fleet” are often in poor condition, but they are thought to transport around 1.7 million barrels of oil a day.
As the ships come from around the world, Lithuanian authorities have to cast a wide net as they search for ships that might be displaying unusual activity.
“This often includes ships flying what we call "cheap flag state," said Premeneckas.
There are tell-tale signs that ships might belong to the “shadow fleet”.
“Unusual shipping lanes, reduced speed,” are all clues that should alert sailors, said Admiral Premeneckas. “We have specific algorithms for identifying ships likely to represent hybrid threats” he continued, without going into details.
However, unlike in Finland, the Lithuanian navy and the crew of the Jotvingis do not board the ships. “We track them using technical means, in particular via radar. We identify them visually from nearby vessels, ask questions if necessary, and then pass on all this information to the relevant authorities like NATO,” explained Premeneckas.
Surveillance: a “deterrent force”
In order to be as thorough as possible, the Lithuanian navy also uses specially designed naval drones to inspect underwater infrastructure for possible damage. The Counteroffensive attended an undersea infrastructure surveillance maneuver, to see how it worked.
The maneuver is not easy. The outside temperature was -6°, and the cold bit sharply at the faces of the crew.
To carry out the inspection, a small dinghy was lowered from the deck of the Jotvingis into the icy sea. It was carrying four specialists armed not with rifles, but a torpedo-shaped drone designed for underwater inspections.
The small bright orange drone can dive to depths of up to 120 meters, well beyond the depth of this part of the Baltic Sea – the average depth of this body of water is approximately 55 meters, or 180 feet.
Once submerged, the drones scan a 500-meter-wide surveillance zone, using sonar and cameras. If the images transmitted reveal anything suspicious, a team of divers is ready to go to the site for further investigation.
The drone's operator, with the surname Gricevirus, monitors the transmitted information in real time, to detect any anomalies. “I can control the drone with a simple phone and the data is sent to analysts for further analysis,” he said. Now far from the Jotvingis, the dinghy bobs in the icy water before the drone is lowered.

“This little thing can do in hours what used to take us days” says Gricevirus, the drone’s operator, standing in the dinghy as the crew prepares to launch the drone. He holds up a rugged smartphone, its screen shielded from the cold by his gloved hand.

After the maneuver, back inside the Jotvingis, Gricevirus leaned over a monitor, its screen brightening with grainy images of the seabed. “If there’s anything unusual, I’ll spot it,” Gricevirus said, his focus never wavering from the screen.
In the adjacent cabin, Marine Officer Keptsuckas, a data analyst, watches the transmitted data. He’s the one who will determine whether the drone has spotted anything worth investigating further.
“I can't say whether we've detected any Russian activity, but we're operating in international waters,” he said with an embarrassed smile. “One thing is certain: Russian ships do gather information on critical infrastructures.”

A ‘war’ without shots fired
“The threat is very high; we are constantly monitoring suspicious Russian vessels,” said Lieutenant Jackunas, the captain's second-in-command.
Added Captain Arunas, his first officer: “In the Black Sea, the Russian and Ukrainian navies shoot at each other. They have clear targets. We can't cross that threshold.”
This restraint is not without its problems, however. Despite evidence, it is hard to establish with complete certainty that Moscow is responsible. “We've reached an 80 percent certainty in some cases, but without the remaining 20 percent, we cannot definitively point to Russia, and evoke [NATO’s collective defense provision known as] Article 5”, explained Linas Kojala, Director General of the Center for Geopolitical and Security Studies in Vilnius.
Kojala thinks that “sabotage” rather than “war” is a more appropriate term to describe recent events in the Baltic region. “The term hybrid warfare is used when there is no direct kinetic threat. So far there has been nothing that would immediately trigger a military conflict,” he explained.

Faced with these challenges, Kojala says that many of Russia’s neighbours are having to weigh up their response.
“For the Baltic States, the red line has already been crossed several times. Now it's a matter of finding a consensus with our partners,” he said. “These measures will be costly, but the longer we delay in taking action, the higher the price we will have to pay”.
On January 22, Lithuania's Minister of National Defense, Dovilė Šakalienė, held talks with Germany's Federal Minister of Defense, Boris Pistorius. At the joint press conference, Boris Pistorius said: “Experts believe that Putin could be in a position to reconstitute his armed forces by 2029. Conditions will then be in place – I'm using a lot of subjunctives here – for a possible theoretical attack on NATO eastern front.”
The hybrid sabotage tactics, employed by Russia, are seen as a test of NATO’s ability to respond to evolving security threats and maintain cohesion in the face of provocations.
Back on the deck of the Jotvingis, waves continue to batter the ship's hull. Eric adjusts his equipment as his eyes detect a shadow on the horizon.
Nothing suspicious yet, but the alert remains constant.
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NEWS OF THE DAY:
Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.
TOP DEM SENATOR: DON’T TAKE EYES OFF MOLDOVA, ROMANIA: As violent as the war in Ukraine is, there are broader Russian threats that the United States needs to pay attention to, said Sen. Chris Coons, a senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Coons recently returned from a Congressional delegation to Moldova and Romania, and gave an exclusive interview with The Counteroffensive to share lessons learned.
“Russia has a playbook, and it has a set of plays that it’s running,” and not just in Ukraine, he said, referring to hybrid warfare techniques that include threats to Moldova's energy security and influence operations in Romania.
“Their sabotage operations are continuing right now across Central and Western Europe: fires and attacks and assassinations; and that their influence operations using social media; cyber attacks; good old fashioned bribery – are actually having an influence on politics,” he warned. "These are not isolated."
I also asked him whether he thought Trump, who campaigned on ending aid to Ukraine, had a popular mandate to do so: "Trump won by 1% of the popular vote. It was a very narrow win," Coons countered. "The Republicans do now have a majority in both the Senate and House, but it is a narrow and fragile majority."
Meanwhile, the senator said that a number of Republican senators feel, as he does, that abandoning Ukraine would be an "enormous strategic error.”
“What we're going to see unfold here in the next couple of days or weeks is whether or not the traditional Republican support for engagement, engagement with NATO, engagement with Europe and the rest of the world will hold,” Coons said.
BELARUSIAN DICTATOR CLAIMS VICTORY FOR SEVENTH TIME: Lukashenko "secured" nearly 87 percent of the votes with a turnout of 85.7% in the presidential election. Apart from the dictator, four other candidates formally participated in the elections, registered to create an illusion of competition so that the "eternal president" wouldn't stand alone.
Ukraine and the European Union have officially refused to recognize the results of the election in Belarus due to its blatantly undemocratic nature. The leading figures of the European Union, Kalas and Kos, say that the elections in Belarus were unfree because they were neither free nor fair. Repressions, restrictions on political participation, and access to the media deprived the elections of legitimacy.
N KOREAN SOLDIERS RETREAT: After suffering heavy losses, North Korean troops temporarily withdrew from the frontline in Russia, Sky News reports.
The North Korean troops fear being captured and have been told to detonate grenades near themselves to avoid it. Additionally, North Korean soldiers show a low level of awareness about threats from drones and artillery strikes. Their foot assaults in groups of 20, 40, or even 60 people make them easy targets.
ISRAEL TRANSFERS WEAPONS TO UKRAINE: According to The Telegraph, it is likely that Israel has started transferring weapons to Ukraine that were seized by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. On January 21, the Israeli side held a meeting with Ukrainian diplomats to discuss the transfer of weapons captured by the IDF during military operations.
Since then, American military cargo planes have been regularly flying from Israel to an airbase in eastern Poland.
HUNGARY READY TO SUPPORT THE EU IN EXTENDING SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA: Budapest may abandon its plans to veto the extension of sanctions against Russia if the deal includes Hungary's concerns about its energy security. EU ambassadors will gather for an emergency meeting today, and the agreement is likely to be officially approved during the foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels. One EU diplomat noted that if Hungary blocks the sanctions, it could harm transatlantic relations.
DOG OF WAR:
This is Dusha, his name is associated with Ukrainian candies ‘Duchess.’ He is obedient, and knows quite a few commands.
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Yelyzaveta
Take the data from this column, and you will see a different Indo-Pacific version if you fast forward two years, or so, when you may see the PRC cut every single cable to Taiwan cut in 24 hours as part of the PRC's opening gambit to create a 'quarantine' of Taiwan. The one-by-one drip of covert and not admitted hybrid cable warfare may instead culminate in something much more dangerous, less hybrid and more overt.
According to the submarine cable map there is a cable running between Russia and Kaliningrad. It looks to me ripe for having a few accidental breakages.