Estonia said last month that it would deploy naval assets to protect cables connecting it with Finland after its Estlink 2 cable was damaged on Christmas Day. Finland is investigating a Russian oil tanker that was seized after the incident and may have been dragging its anchor along the seabed.
“Three cases in one year cannot be a coincidence,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb said last month.
NATO is also deploying at least two ships to the Baltic Sea area for surveillance.
While the alliance’s heightened alert mostly involves Russia’s “shadow fleet” of smuggling ships, Chinese-owned vessels have come under suspicion as well, including in November when one freighter was detained for weeks in Danish waters after two fiber-optic cables were damaged.
The ship, Yi Peng 3, was alleged to have damaged cables that ran between Sweden and Lithuania and Finland and Germany after leaving the Russian port of Ust-Luga, on the Gulf of Finland. The ship continued its journey after investigators from Sweden and other countries were allowed to board.
Swedish authorities said they were satisfied with the inspection and did not say whether any evidence had been found. China has said it will continue to cooperate with regional authorities in the investigation.
Though European authorities have detained ships when sabotage is suspected, in the absence of concrete proof they have stopped short of directly blaming Moscow or Beijing.
Still, the anxiety in Taiwan is heightened.
“Patrol of undersea cables is really time-consuming. It adds an extra burden and becomes more resource-consuming for the coast guard,” said Yisuo Tzeng, a Taipei-based researcher at Taiwan’s defense ministry-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
The Taiwanese coast guard said that although the intentions of the Xing Shun 39 on Jan. 3 were “impossible to confirm,” it could not rule out the possibility of the vessel “engaging in gray-zone interference.”
The coast guard said it was unable to board the vessel due to bad weather, but had asked South Korean authorities in Busan, its destination port, to collect evidence.
Data from Marine Traffic showed the freighter making erratic movements that day a few miles off Taiwan’s northern city of Keelung, where a submarine cable connects the island to both the U.S. and China.
Because the cable is also connected to China, some analysts say it may be premature to blame Beijing for the disruption.
“If there is an outage of a particular cable for half a day, for one hour, we’re talking billions of dollars of investment loss,” said Gerard Parr, who has worked on submarine cable projects and is a professor of telecommunications engineering at the University of East Anglia in Britain.
“There’s nothing to be gained by this because there’s economic value in maintaining the cable,” he added.
While Chunghwa Telecom has not said which cable was damaged, the Taiwanese giant co-owns the Trans-Pacific Express, a nearly 11,000-mile undersea system that connects Taiwan with China, Japan, South Korea and the U.S.
Companies from all of those places share ownership of the cables.
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