Germany takes the fight to Russia in undersea cable war

Yahoo

21-02-2025

It was once considered a joke army, so poorly equipped that its soldiers turned up for Nato training exercises with broomsticks for machine guns.
But Stephan Haisch, a rear admiral in the Bundeswehr, Germany's armed forces, says those days are over.
As Germany prepares for an election on Sunday, with defence a hot-button issue, it is also taking the lead in a new Nato mission to defend the Baltic Sea from Russian sabotage.
Rear-Adml Haisch is the commander of Task Force Baltic (CTF), a German Navy-led Nato headquarters that opened last October in Rostock, on the country's northern Baltic coast.
His task: to survey and, if necessary, board suspicious ships which may be involved in Russian attempts to cut critical cables on the Baltic seabed.
'Germany is ready and willing to take on responsibility for the Baltic Sea, and is establishing itself as a strong partner,' Rear-Adml Haisch told The Telegraph.
He batted-away suggestions that Germany has been reluctant to take on a bigger role in defending Europe since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The new headquarters, which oversees Nato forces in the Baltic from a control room inside the German Navy's Rostock base, has set pulses racing in Moscow.
Russian officials claim it is a 'blatant breach' of a 1990s treaty which banned the stationing of new Nato forces in the territory of former Communist East Germany.
The Russian foreign ministry threatened 'extremely negative consequences,' for the creation of the headquarters, and said that a 'corresponding response' was being drawn up by the Kremlin.
But Rear-Adml Haisch denies the headquarters is a breach of that treaty, and is not perturbed by the bombastic rhetoric from Moscow. If anything, he seems slightly amused by it.
'I could say that people are bothered by [the task force] in Russia, and that is a good sign, if people are bothered in Russia, because then we have achieved a certain effect,' he says wryly. 'But as far as the legal aspect is concerned, I see no problems at all.'
The Baltic Sea, crossed by at least two thousand ships a day, has become the latest battleground in Vladimir Putin's so-called hybrid war, which uses sabotage, cyber-attacks and assassination plots to undermine Western support for Ukraine.
A key concern for the West is a series of recent incidents when undersea telecoms cables in the Baltic Sea were mysteriously severed.
The two most serious incidents were in November, when a rogue vessel cut a telecoms cable connecting the Swedish island of Gotland to Lithuania, as well as the C-Lion cable between Finland and Germany.
A Chinese ship, the Yi Peng 3, is suspected of causing the damage, and Western officials believe it may have done so on behalf of the Russian intelligence services.
China and Russia deny this and have suggested the damage was an accident, though Western officials and security experts find that excuse hard to believe.
Those two suspected sabotage acts, and a third incident of a severed cable in January which turned out to be a false alarm, have put CTF Baltic at the centre of Nato's efforts to police the Baltic Sea.
It is now the job of Rear-Adml Haisch, and his multinational team of sailors drawn from other Nato allies, to look out for activity that might suggest sabotage is underway.
But what makes that work very challenging, he says, is that it is 'very, very difficult' to confirm whether a ship has cut a cable as part of a Russian plot, or has simply made a 'stupid' mistake.
'If you don't have a well-trained crew, it might drop the anchor because they've been told to wait three days, or because there is a lack of orders, or because there is bad weather, and not realise there is a cable underneath them,' he says.
'It's stupid, because the cables are marked on the nautical chart, but they just don't know. It can happen – but it is really stupid and shortsighted.'
Part of the game, therefore, is making sure that vessels in the Baltic know that the German navy is keeping a close eye on them, to deter any rogue behaviour.
'If I'm out on one of our ships and see someone who has their anchor in a strange place, then I can say, hey, I just noticed that your anchor is not right.
'If you want, I'd be happy to come on board and give you assistance and help you, or I'll put you in touch with someone who can help you,' the Rear Admiral says.
He adds: 'Or I'll recommend that you stop here now, because you're in danger, and you really have a problem. You can play it like that, and I think more people now realise that we know what's going on, and that we're paying more attention.
'I think that we'll get more results that way and that we'll be able to say, okay, if something happens, we'll know it was you and we'll get you.'
The Bundeswehr is not the military force that would traditionally be looked to as a European leader. Britain or France are more obvious choices.
In the decades that followed the Second World War, Germany struggled with the very concept of muscular armed forces, initially because of its Nazi past and later a sense that it could rely on the United States if it ever got into any serious predicament.
But that attitude changed after Vladimir Putin's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which prompted Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, to declare a Zeitenwende – 'a turning of the times' – on defence.
Mr Scholz announced a €100 billion (£80 billion) defence package to build up the German army, and eventually agreed to send powerful weapons to Ukrainian forces, including Patriot missiles, Leopard tanks and hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds.
At the same time he unhooked Germany from its addiction to cheap Russian gas and pledged €44 billion (£36 billion) in support for Ukraine, making Berlin the world's biggest contributor after the US.
Other bold pledges, however, such as reintroducing conscription, have not materialised. And Mr Scholz's hugely expensive financial and military contributions to Ukraine have driven-up support for the Kremlin-friendly, far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is polling in second place ahead of the Feb 23 election.
Even so, the Bundeswehr is seeking to project a strikingly different image of its readiness, hoping to cast off memories of the humiliating Nato exercise of 2014, when its soldiers stuck painted broomsticks on Boxer armoured vehicles in lieu of machine guns.
'We can always discuss comparisons between the past and the present, but today the German navy is the largest Nato navy here in the Baltic Sea among the Nato partners,' Rear-Adml Haisch says.
'So in that respect it is obvious that we, as the largest nation, the largest Navy, want to take on responsibility. And that is also the case with the other nations now, I would say, that they have accepted it and gladly accepted it. So there are now no concerns that we in Germany cannot manage it or any competitive thoughts, that 'we could do it better'.'
Asked about Russia's claims that CTF Baltic violates the so-called 'two-plus-four' treaty from 1990 on German reunification, which governs troop deployments in eastern Germany, he insists it does not 'in any way'.
'There are provisions that Nato troops may not be permanently stationed in the new states of Germany [formerly Communist East Germany]. But, we have not done this. CTF Baltic is a German-led headquarters with multinational staff members,' he explains.
Mysterious damage to undersea cables is not the only Russia-linked security threat that the German Navy is concerned about.
Moscow's shadow fleet, a ragtag assortment of poorly maintained tankers that evade sanctions to bring in oil and other key supplies, is also a constant presence in the Baltic.
They sail through international waters under the guise of normal commerce, and there is little Germany and other Baltic navies can do about them.
But Rear-Adml Haisch says he's concerned that the ships, which tend to be in a dire state of repair, could end up causing a major oil spill in Germany's back yard.
'If a tanker runs aground, and thousands of tons of oil spill out, whether it is intentional or not, we don't know, but of course the consequences in this case for the environment, for tourism and for the population, are immense,' he says.
'That is what makes it so difficult, especially in the Baltic Sea because it is so small, and because you have to react immediately.'
A recent Greenpeace report warned that a shadow-fleet oil spill would be catastrophic for Germany's northern coast, which is covered in bird sanctuaries and nature reserves.
'The largest tankers can carry volumes of oil equivalent to more than 100 Olympic swimming pools. A spill from one of these vessels would result in an environmental disaster of unprecedented scale,' said Wiebke Denkena and Oliver Worm, investigators for the environmental activists.
As Rear-Adml Haisch's interview draws to a close, he gives The Telegraph a brief tour of a control room at CTF Baltic, consisting of large TV screens showing ship tracking data.
Some of the screens, however, have been blacked out with the message 'no signal,' and the Rear Admiral explains they display sensitive ship data.
Sitting at workstations are a group of sailors from other Nato allies, such as Estonia, Finland, Sweden and Poland, eyes glued to the screens.
It all looks like complex, tense and possibly risky work. But is it a Nato war room, as Russia suggests?
'There is always a question of how one defines war,' the Baltic Sea commander says cautiously. 'But of course we are not currently in a war in the sense of Article Five of Nato, as a form of defence.'
This is the second part in The Telegraph's four-part German election series. Read part one here.
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