By Galina Korol | 2025-01-03

KYIV -- Russia continues to expand its hybrid attacks targeting civilian technology and utility infrastructure, threatening the security and well being of many countries.

The situation is becoming critical and the consequences could be tragic, NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid and Cyber James Appathurai warned.

Suspected Russian hybrid attacks across Europe, the United States and Canada are reaching a volume that would have been "utterly unacceptable" five years ago, Appathurai told Sky News in Brussels in a report published December 30.

"We can definitely count dozens. Up to 100 for sure. But then there's a lot of foiled plots," Appathurai said.

In one of the latest developments in this regard, Finland on December 26 seized a Russia-linked oil tanker suspected of "damaging an undersea power line and four telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea," Reuters reported.

The trend became pronounced after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led to international sanctions.

The Kremlin's global sabotage is an attempt to undermine individual countries' economies and demonstrate its willingness to use trade in waging a hybrid war, said Ihor Reiterovych, director of political and legal programs at the Ukrainian Center for Social Development.

"It is outright terrorism with economic consequences," he told Kontur. "And we could be talking about almost any industry."

'Baltic Jammer'

Serious Global Positioning System (GPS) outages are increasingly occurring in the Baltic Sea, affecting aircraft navigation systems.

Since the start of the Russian full-scale invasion, complaints about GPS malfunctions have increased sharply, especially from private airlines, T-online, a German news site, reported April 4.

The airspace of Poland, the Baltics, southern Sweden and northeastern Germany is most affected.

Between the end of December 2023 and the beginning of April 2024 alone, "thousands" of GPS failures occurred, according to analysts.

The Russian military is using a powerful GPS jamming system, analysts of open source intelligence determined.

This so-called "Baltic Jammer" operates in Kaliningrad, and another GPS-jamming machine may be in St. Petersburg, the pseudonymous social media user "Auonsson" posted November 10 on BlueSky.

Last April, Auonsson posted several datasets on X proving the Kaliningrad jammer's location.

Civil aviation risks

In one such incident in mid-March last year, the GPS signal of the plane carrying UK Defense Minister Grant Shapps back from Poland was disrupted as it flew near Kaliningrad province, Russia.

The aircraft's crew had to use alternative methods to determine its location, the Times of London reported March 14.

"It is not unusual for aircraft to experience GPS jamming near Kaliningrad, which is of course Russian territory," a UK government spokesman said at the time.

These incidents not only threaten flight safety but increase chaos in the region, analysts say.

"This directly harms civil aviation. It directly harms everything associated with GPS navigation," said political scientist Ihor Chalenko, director of Ukraine's Center for Analysis and Strategies.

Chalenko referred to the fatal Azerbaijan Airlines (AHY) plane crash on December 25.

That "catastrophe began specifically with GPS jamming," he said of AHY 8243, which crash landed in Kazakhstan after a Russian air defense missile struck the plane.

Underwater sabotage

Russian military activity has surged near key underwater internet cables as well.

Russian submarines have been found patrolling near the modern communication lines through which 95% of international data pass. Damage to these cables threatens economic and social upheaval.

"We are concerned about heightened Russian naval activity worldwide and that Russia's decision calculus for damaging US and allied undersea critical infrastructure may be changing," one US official told CNN in September on condition of anonymity.

Russia even has a dedicated military unit -- the General Staff Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research (known by its Russian acronym GUGI) -- for carrying out possible sabotage on underwater infrastructure, CNN reported September 6.

"Russia is continuing to develop naval capabilities for undersea sabotage mainly thru GUGI," the US official said.

The seas around Northern Europe have already been subjected to repeated sabotage.

Mykhailo Gonchar, president of Ukraine's Strategy XXI Center for Global Studies, called it a "tactic of covert piracy against strategic communications."

The Kremlin is targeting "telecommunication cables," "gas pipelines" and "power cables," he told Kontur.

All these utilities are vital to the security and stability of the Baltic region, Gonchar said.

"Sabotage causes this or that line to malfunction, disrupts operations, so in one way or another, it leads to losses for the owners, who must repair the damage," he said.

"And this is all taking place during the unfavorable autumn to winter period."

Russia masks these actions as "accidents" using other countries' ships, which coincidentally have a Russian crew or Russian captain, Gonchar said.

"When the Balticconnector, an underwater gas pipeline, and the fiber-optic cable connecting Estonia and Finland were severed on October 7, 2023, people thought it was an accident, that a Chinese container ship dropped its anchor in the wrong place," he said. "But then they began to wonder how it could have dragged the anchor for 185km?!"

In the severing of a Northern European fiber optic cable last November 18, another offending ship dragged anchor "for roughly 170km," he added.

Threats to food supply

Russia, lashing out at the international order that opposes its invasion of Ukraine, is fomenting chaos worldwide and even threatening the food supply of poor countries, analysts point out.

It has built ties with various radical groups, such as Yemen's Houthis, who are attacking shipping routes in the Red Sea, according to multiple media reports.

"The Kremlin is interested in having friends who can test the nerves of Moscow's enemies in the Red Sea or anywhere in the Middle East," said Ruslan Suleymanov, a scholar of Oriental studies, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported November 26.

But the Russian effort to choke off Ukrainian grain exports, which Middle Eastern and African countries need, had failed by early 2024, the Council on Foreign Relations reported at the time.