A cargo ship that sailed from Russia was detained in the Gulf of Finland on Wednesday following damage to an underwater data cable linking Finland and Estonia. “A ship that was in the area at the time of the cable damage between Helsinki and Tallinn has been diverted to Finnish waters,” Prime Minister Petteri Orpo posted on X. “The government is closely monitoring the situation.” The Fitburg, which was under the flag of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, had departed St. Petersburg, Russia on Dec. 30 and was en route to Israel with crew from Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Telecoms provider Elisa notified authorities at 5 a.m. of a cable break in Estonia’s exclusive economic zone, which extends 200 nautical miles from its coast. Hours later a Finnish patrol vessel caught the Fitburg with its anchor in the water in Finland’s exclusive economic zone, the country’s coast guard reported. “At the moment we suspect aggravated disruption of telecommunications and also aggravated sabotage and attempted aggravated sabotage,” Helsinki police chief Jari Liukku told media. “Finland is prepared for security challenges of various kinds, and we respond to them as necessary,” President Alexander Stubb said on X. Earlier this year the NATO military alliance launched its “Baltic Sentry” program to stop attacks against subsea energy and data cables in the Baltic Sea that have multiplied following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The sabotage has included the severing of an internet cable between Finland and Germany in November 2024 and another between Finland and Sweden the following month. A July study by the University of Washington found that 10 subsea cables in the Baltic Sea had been cut since 2022. “A majority of these incidents have raised suspicions of sabotage by state actors, specifically Russia and China, who have been particularly active in the region,” the study noted.

Denmark’s military intelligence service has for the first time classified the U.S. as a security risk, a striking shift in how one of Washington’s closest European allies assesses the transatlantic relationship. In its 2025 intelligence outlook published Wednesday, the Danish Defense Intelligence Service warned that the U.S. is increasingly prioritizing its own interests and “using its economic and technological strength as a tool of power,” including toward allies and partners. “The United States uses economic power, including in the form of threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will and no longer excludes the use of military force, even against allies,” it said, in a pointed reference to Washington trying to wrest control of Greenland from Denmark. The assessment is one of the strongest warnings about the U.S. to come from a European intelligence service. In October, the Dutch spies said they had stopped sharing some intelligence with their U.S. counterparts, citing political interference and human rights concerns. The Danish warning underscores European unease as Washington leverages industrial policy more aggressively on the global stage, and highlights the widening divide between the allies, with the U.S. National Security Strategy stating that Europe will face the “prospect of civilizational erasure” within the next 20 years. The Danish report also said that “there is uncertainty about how China-U.S. relations will develop in the coming years” as Beijing’s rapid rise has eroded the U.S.’s long-held position as the undisputed global power. Washington and Beijing are now locked in a contest for influence, alliances and critical resources, which has meant the U.S. has “significantly prioritized” the geographical area around it — including the Arctic — to reduce China’s influence. “The USA’s increasingly strong focus on the Pacific Ocean is also creating uncertainty about the country’s role as the primary guarantor of security in Europe,” the report said. “The USA’s changed policy places great demands on armaments and cooperation between European countries to strengthen deterrence against Russia.” In the worst-case scenario, the Danish intelligence services predict that Western countries could find themselves in a situation in a few years where both Russia and China are ready to fight their own regional wars in the Baltic Sea region and the Taiwan Strait, respectively.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned that the end of Russia’s war in Ukraine might lead to efforts to rekindle economic ties with Russia — including the restarting of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. As Europe faces the possibility of peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, Tusk described calls by European politicians to rebuild ties to Moscow at the eventual end of the war as “an alarm bell.” “[I know] it means that someone in Europe wants to restore Nord Stream 2, to have good business with oil and gas from Russia, and so on,” he said. “For me, it’s always like an alarm bell,” Tusk said in an interview with the Sunday Times. A major pipeline transporting gas from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea, Nord Stream 2 is described by critics as a strategic mistake and a symbol of Europe’s appeasement to Moscow. The pipeline was blown up in 2022 after the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A Ukrainian professional diver was later arrested over his suspected involvement in the sabotage. “The problem with North Stream 2 is not that it was blown up. The problem is that it was built,” Tusk wrote on X social media earlier this month. In the Sunday Times interview, Tusk said that a Polish court ruling blocking a German extradition request for one of the suspects in the Nord Stream sabotage means that Ukraine has a right to attack Russia-linked targets anywhere in Europe. The Polish leader also berated Europe’s complacency and its constant underrating of Putin’s expansionist threats. “We are talking about the end of the era of illusions in Europe — too late, I’m afraid. Too late to be well prepared for all the threats, but not too late to survive,” Tusk said. Also in the interview, Tusk described Britain’s exit from the EU as “one of the biggest mistakes in our [shared European] history”— 10 years after U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s ill-fated attempt to use the Brexit referendum as leverage to extract concessions from the EU. “And today I think it’s much more visible,” said Tusk, who was well-steeped in the first phase of the Brexit negotiations as president of the European Council at the time.  “Especially after Brexit, Poles realized that the objective situation in the U.K. is not much better than in Poland. I also know that Brits are starting to leave the U.K. and begin a life here in Poland,” he said.

NATO will send more warplanes and air defense systems to the eastern flank in response to Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace, the alliance’s top officials announced Friday. “Today, NATO is launching Eastern Sentry to bolster our posture along eastern flank,” Secretary-General Mark Rutte told reporters. On Wednesday, Polish and Dutch fighter jets scrambled to shoot down Russian drones in Poland’s airspace, in one of most serious violations of a NATO country’s sovereignty. Eastern Sentry, which starts Friday, will be modeled after Baltic Sentry, where frigates, aircraft and drones monitor the Baltic Sea. NATO allies will also experiment with new technologies such as counter-drones, sensors and weapons in Eastern Sentry, said Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen. Alexus Grynkewich. The mission — described as an “entire new defense design” — will also integrate current “individual air policing actions and individual ground based air defenses.” Denmark, France, the U.K. and Germany have already offered contributions including fighter jets, ships and ground-based air defense systems. Grynkewich hailed Wednesday’s operation in Polish airspace as a success, but said NATO is working to get “lower cost weapons that we can use to defend ourselves to make this a sustainable operation over time.” Rutte — echoing U.S. President Donald Trump but going against Poland and Germany’s assessment — refused to explicitly say that the Russian incursion was intentional. “We are still assessing,” he said. “Whether or not Russia’s actions were deliberate, they violated NATO air space. The question is relevant but not that relevant — in both cases, it’s reckless, unacceptable.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants the EU to help front-line countries monitor and defend their borders against potential Russian aggression — backing a long-standing request from Poland and Baltic nations. “There is no doubt: Europe’s eastern flank keeps all of Europe safe. From the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. This is why we must invest in supporting it through an Eastern Flank Watch,” she told European lawmakers in her State of the Union address Wednesday morning. “This means giving Europe independent strategic capabilities. We must invest in real-time space surveillance so that no movement of forces goes unseen. We must heed the call of our Baltic friends and build a drone wall,” the German politician added. Von der Leyen’s comments came only a few hours after Poland scrambled fighter jets to shoot down Russian drones that entered its airspace. Back in June, Romania also sent warplanes to monitor Russian drones approaching its border. Wednesday’s incident over Poland has been perceived by Western allies as a way for Russian President Vladimir Putin to test NATO’s defenses. Front-line countries — especially Poland, Estonia and Lithuania — have long called for the EU to contribute financially to the defense of their borders. They argue their efforts will protect the bloc as a whole against any attack from Russia, as military and intelligence top brass have warned in the past that Putin could target Baltic nations or Poland to test NATO’s mettle. They have successfully pushed for money from the EU’s loans-for-weapons SAFE scheme to be easily available for items including drones and anti-drone systems. Warsaw launched a project last year dubbed East Shield that aims to strengthen the Polish border with Russia and Belarus, while Baltic nations are starting to teach children to build and fly drones. Countries such as Lithuania are also behind the idea of a “drone wall,” which they see as a permanent presence of unmanned aerial vehicles on their borders to monitor threats. A few days before giving her State of the Union address, von der Leyen went on a front-line state tour that took her to countries including Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. “Last week, I saw this for myself when I visited front-line member states. They know best the threat Russia poses,” she told European lawmakers on Wednesday. Von der Leyen also announced the EU will enter into a so-called Drone Alliance with Ukraine and front-load €6 billion from the G7-led Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration (ERA). Russia’s war in Ukraine has highlighted the importance of drones in warfare — they can be used for surveillance purposes and as lethal weapons to reach remote or dangerous areas. Ukraine is widely perceived as being innovative with the technology, namely through the use of AI and automation. Von der Leyen gave few details about the defense road map she has to present to EU leaders in October, but did say she wants to launch a so-called European Semester of Defence to monitor capitals’ progress in military buildup.

ABOARD THE M.S. JANTAR IN THE BALTIC SEA — The European Commission is expected to today present its latest tranche of sanctions on Russian energy exports and financial institutions. Three EU officials who were granted anonymity to confirm the timing of the plan told POLITICO that the package — the 18th to be imposed on Moscow since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine — is set to be circulated later today. The new measures are designed to restrict the operations of companies with links to the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, diplomats previously confirmed, as well as to the banks the Kremlin uses to move funds internationally. They come ahead of a G7 summit in Alberta, Canada that begins this weekend, with a handful of other major economies including India, Brazil, Mexico and Ukraine invited to take part. “We are primarily concerned with sanctioning Russian energy and drying up Russia’s sources of finance,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said of the 18th package last week. Brussels has sought to build support in Washington for a joint push against the revenues Moscow is using to fund its war. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham recently toured Europe to pitch a proposal to hit countries that buy Russian fossil fuels with a 500 percent tariff. Von der Leyen has said the EU would support that push with its own measures, although it’s highly unlikely the bloc would match it, and the White House has yet to throw its weight behind the idea.

WARSAW — Donald Trump and his followers have a clear favorite in Sunday’s Polish presidential vote — populist right-winger Karol Nawrocki. However, Poles haven’t yet made up their minds. All the polling in the last couple of weeks shows a statistical dead heat between Nawrocki and his liberal rival, Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski. The winner will determine whether the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who backs Trzaskowski, can speed up its legislative agenda and continue Poland’s process of reintegration with the EU mainstream. Nawrocki, backed by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party that ruled Poland from 2015 to 2023, promises a return to traditional values that will block Tusk and once again put Warsaw at odds with Brussels. WHO ARE THE CANDIDATES? Trzaskowski, 53, is a long-time politician who has served as a minister and was also a member of the European Parliament. He narrowly failed in a bid to become president five years ago against incumbent Andrzej Duda. The multi-lingual son of a jazz musician has been the mayor of Warsaw, Poland’s largest city and its political, cultural and economic hub, since 2018. There he enraged conservatives by backing cultural diversity and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as not allowing Christian crosses in new office buildings. He is a deputy leader of the centrist Civic Platform party led by Tusk — which has opened him up to attacks for being closely associated with an increasingly unpopular government. Nawrocki, 42, is a political neophyte. He was chosen to run as the PiS candidate although he is not a member of the party. The historian was the director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, where he came under fire over accusations he had changed the exhibit to underline Polish suffering during the war. He’s now head of the Institute of National Remembrance, a state body that investigates crimes against the Polish nation by the Nazis and the communists. Initially, Nawrocki touted his credentials by jogging and doing push-ups, but the campaign has been brutal for him. Karol Nawrocki, 42, is a political neophyte. | Darek Delmanowicz/EFE via EPA In March it emerged that he had appeared on a TV show in disguise, blurred out and using a pseudonym, to promote a book he had written on organized crime and to praise himself. Then he came under fire after he was accused of improperly taking over an elderly man’s apartment. He’s admitted to taking part in pitched fist-fights among football hooligans. In recent days he’s been fending off accusations that he had secured prostitutes at a luxury hotel on the Baltic Sea, where he was working as a security guard. As well, a probe into the remembrance institute found spending that was “mismanaged, unreliable, in violation of the law.” WHERE DOES THE RACE STAND? On a knife edge. Trzaskowski narrowly won the first round of the presidential election on May 18 with just under 31.4 percent of the vote. Nawrocki was close behind at 29.5 percent. Polling done since then hasn’t changed much, with Trzaskowski generally ahead by around a percentage point, but within the margin of error of the surveys. The two have been scrambling to pick up the votes of the minor candidates who were knocked out of the race. Traszkowski is likely to get those of candidates from the centrist and left-wing parties that make up Tusk’s ruling coalition. The big push is for the disaffected voters angry with both PiS and Civic Platform. Far-left candidate Adrian Zandberg took 4.9 percent, antisemite and Euroskeptic Grzegorz Braun took 6.3 percent and Sławomir Mentzen, leader of the far-right libertarian Confederation party, got 14.8 percent. After meeting Nawrocki and Trzaskowski on his popular YouTube livestream, Mentzen ultimately ruled out supporting either man. Nawrocki signed on to a list of demands from Mentzen, including blocking Ukraine from joining NATO. Mentzen denounced Trzaskowski as a “leftist” but then had a beer with him and Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski. WHY SHOULD I CARE? Poland is a fast-rising European powerhouse. Its economy has exploded from a post-communist basket case into a prosperous member of the EU. It has the largest army in the bloc, spends the most on defense of any NATO member, and is a frontline nation whose support is crucial for Ukraine to continue the fight against Russia. The presidential race will have a big say on whether Poland plays in the EU’s big league or if it retreats back into isolation alongside other populist-governed countries in Central Europe like Hungary and Slovakia. During PiS’s eight years in power it got into fights with the EU and other allies over efforts to politicize the justice system, attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, tightening abortion rules and using state money for party aims. However, it also directed a deluge of money toward poorer voters and gave often-ignored people from smaller towns and villages a sense that their more conservative values were important. IS THE PRESIDENT IMPORTANT? Poland’s president is a largely ceremonial job — the incumbent gets to live in a fancy palace, signs off on people becoming professors, generals and ambassadors, and is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, although it’s the government that sets foreign and military policy, not the president. He can initiate legislation. But he does have real power — albeit of a negative kind. A president can veto bills that can only be overridden with a three-fifths majority in parliament. That’s a level no party has in Poland’s deeply divided political landscape. The president can also send legislation to be analyzed by the Constitutional Tribunal, a top court, which is largely equivalent to a veto. Rafał Trzaskowski, 53, is a long-time politician who has served as a minister and was also a member of the European Parliament. | Andrzej Jackowski/EFE via EPA Tusk spelled out the perks of the job in 2010: “honors, chandeliers, a palace and a veto.” PiS-backed President Duda has blocked much of Tusk’s legislative agenda, leading to growing frustration among his voters and one of the reasons that the government is seeing a steady fall in public support. Running with PiS’s backing, Nawrocki is the party’s chance to keep an important power center under control and continue to torpedo the Tusk government, hoping to fan disillusionment until the next general election in 2027. Trzaskowski would end all government excuses for inaction. It would also likely set off a civil war within PiS and a battle with Mentzen’s Confederation over which party dominates the right. In the final stretch of the campaign, Trzaskowski has been doing a straddle — cozying up to far-right voters while ensuring left-leaning voters don’t abandon him and mobilizing people who abstained in the first round. Trzaskowski has bet on positive messaging, emphasizing cooperation and accord in place of “chaos and uproar,” as well as his experience as mayor and minister. “Choose wisely, there’ll be no returns,” he told one of his final rallies Thursday. At one his gatherings, Nawrocki said voters will have to choose either a “flesh-and-blood man” who has “come a long way,” and knows what life is like for ordinary Poles, or a “coward” beholden to “German foundations, German capital, developers, bankers and millionaires.” WHERE DOES TRUMP COME IN? Poland isn’t Canada, where opposition to Trump handed a victory to Prime Minister Mark Carney. Poland is one of Europe’s most pro-American countries, where the U.S. is seen as the ultimate guarantor of Poland’s security. Trzaskowski has stressed Poland’s (and his) close relationship with the U.S. “Americans and President Trump are very pragmatic; I have never said a bad word about President Trump, and I have a sensational relationship with the Republicans,” he said. But Nawrocki visited Trump in the Oval Office in early May, where he said Trump told him: “You will win.” At this week’s CPAC Poland, the first time the MAGA conservative conference has been held in Poland, Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, endorsed Nawrocki. “Donald Trump is a strong leader for us, but you have an opportunity to have just as strong of a leader in Karol if you make him the leader of this country,” she said, and denounced Trzaskowski as a “socialist” and “an absolute train wreck of a leader.” Wojciech Kość contributed to this report from Warsaw.

WARSAW — Numerous skeletons have tumbled out of Karol Nawrocki’s closet during Poland’s presidential election campaign, but the increasingly lurid accusations about his past aren’t harming his chances — and may even help the populist right-winger win Sunday’s nail-biter contest. The political temperature is boiling in the final stretch of the race. Donald Tusk, Poland’s pro-EU center-right prime minister, has accused the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) opposition party of backing Nawrocki’s presidential bid despite knowing of his links to gangsters and prostitution. The candidate himself is also suggesting he took part in pitched battles of football hooligans, playing up his skills as a boxer.   It’s been a sensational escalation from the somewhat surreal accusations against Nawrocki in the earlier weeks of the campaign. In March it emerged that he had appeared on a TV show in disguise, blurred out and using a pseudonym, to promote a book he had written on organized crime and to praise himself. Matters took a more serious turn this month when the circumstances of Nawrocki’s acquisition of an apartment from an elderly man in the northern city of Gdańsk ignited a political controversy. But the accusations that he is linked to the underworld — which Nawrocki has adamantly denied as a media fabrication — have ratcheted up the debate over his fitness for the presidency. POLARIZED POLES The big question is whether any of this is moving the needle in Poland’s highly polarized society. Just like his political ally U.S. President Donald Trump, whom he met earlier in the campaign, Nawrocki is proving adept at deflecting the accusations against him as fantasies and lies from the liberal camp. Nawrocki’s campaign in fact shows no signs of buckling under the accusations, and POLITICO’s Poll of Polls puts the contest on a knife edge, with Nawrocki polling only one percentage point behind his rival, liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski.   Poland is an important player in the EU and NATO, and the high-stakes election is being closely watched as a signal about the country’s trajectory. A win for Trzaskowski would allow Tusk to steer Warsaw back to the heart of the EU mainstream, whereas Nawrocki as president would be able to scupper much of Tusk’s reformist agenda.   Nawrocki is drawing parallels between himself and Trump as he hits back against his critics. “Media slander did not destroy President Trump. It will not destroy Karol Nawrocki, either,” he said on his campaign’s X account Wednesday. In addition to meeting Trump, the PiS-backed presidential candidate was also a speaker at MAGA’s CPAC conference in Poland, held Tuesday in the southeastern town of Jasionka. And just like Trump, Nawrocki has a solid base that is impervious to much of the noise about his past. “In a deeply polarized society, anything is possible and that is the most fitting answer as to why this is happening,” said Anna Siewierska-Chmaj, a political scientist from the University of Rzeszów. “These scandals may have actually helped Nawrocki since PiS abandoned the narrative of [his] being a ‘citizens’ candidate’ and closed ranks behind him as a de facto party candidate. This has put the unconvinced PiS voters firmly behind Nawrocki.” PULLING NO PUNCHES Tusk has pulled no punches in combatting Nawrocki, accusing PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński of backing an unsuitable candidate. “You knew about everything, Jarosław. About the connections with the gangsters, about ‘arranging for girls’ … about the apartment fraud and other matters still hidden. The entire responsibility for this catastrophe falls on you!” he wrote on X. The most serious accusations stem from testimony provided to Polish online portal Onet that Nawrocki had secured prostitutes at a luxury hotel on the Baltic Sea, where he was working for security. A member of parliament from Tusk’s party then appeared on television to vouch for the report. “I have knowledge that all the information presented … in the Onet article is simply true,” said Agnieszka Pomaska, who represents Gdańsk, the city on the Baltic Sea where the alleged offences took place. Karol Nawrocki has a solid base that is impervious to much of the noise about his past. | Albert Zawada/EFE via EPA Nawrocki emphatically denies the accusations, says he will sue Onet over the report, and is hitting back hard against Tusk and Trzaskowski. “Today in Poland the problem is political prostitution, which wants to give Poland away for foreign money … Media assistants of Tusk and Trzaskowski will not take away our victory!” he wrote on X. Conversely, when it comes to suggestions he was involved in mass brawls involving as many as 140 football hooligans, far from pushing back Nawrocki has embraced the notion, playing up his pedigree as a boxer and saying he took part in “sporting, noble fights.” Another allegation emerged in a report by Gazeta Wyborcza, a major liberal newspaper, over Nawrocki’s security clearance — something he needed for his job as the head of the Institute of National Remembrance, a state agency tracking Nazi and Communist crimes against Poles. The report claimed that Nawrocki’s assessment by the ABW counterintelligence agency was initially negative until the agency’s then-chief — now an aide to outgoing President Andrzej Duda — overrode it. Nawrocki’s campaign team had no response to the security clearance issue when contacted by POLITICO. But the election campaign attacks haven’t all been levelled at Nawrocki. PiS has also tried to undermine Trzaskowski, more recently by suggesting he is refusing to undergo drug testing because he has something to hide. When asked about that claim on Monday, Trzaskowski replied: “I am surprised that you are asking this kind of question, because it is Karol Nawrocki who clearly has a problem. It is like when someone has a car accident — they should examine themselves, not ask others to do it.”  PiS also said Wednesday that Trzaskowski could be implicated in a complex “garbage scandal” that has festered for years at Warsaw town hall. Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office said it had charged 17 people — some close to municipal government in the capital — with corruption involving fake invoices related to the rental of waste management equipment. Trzaskowski, who has been mayor of Warsaw since 2018, has long denied any role and sued a PiS-linked newspaper over such allegations two years ago. TIED TO TUSK PiS’s main strategy has been to associate Trzaskowski with Tusk’s government, whose popularity is waning. An April poll by Opinia24 for private broadcaster Radio Zet showed 51 percent of Poles giving the government a negative assessment less than two years after it took power. Only 39 percent of respondents said they were happy with the Tusk administration. Monthly surveys gauging the mood in Poland showed supporters of the government at 34 percent of respondents in April, compared to 40 percent opposed. “In the final stretch of the election campaign … Donald Tusk is making it clear that he wants to install his puppet in the presidential palace,” Andrzej Śliwka, a member of parliament for PiS and an aide to Nawrocki’s campaign, told a press conference Wednesday. “Rafał Trzaskowski is Donald Tusk’s puppet, and Tusk wants a politician … who will be completely subservient to him. That is why Tusk will stop at nothing.” Siewierska-Chmaj fears the more feverish the campaign becomes, the greater the risk of an explosive backlash. “I would say we’re already at a point where this threatens to erupt — even, I would go so far as to say, into acts of violence. The level of polarization and mutual animosity is starting to translate into real aggression, and it’s becoming increasingly clear,” she said.

LONDON — Britain’s undersea infrastructure is highly vulnerable to Russian sabotage. That’s the stark warning from defense and energy experts ahead of the country’s major strategic defense review, expected next week. They warn that critical gas pipelines, power lines and data cables are the “soft belly of British security” — leaving the country exposed to potentially “catastrophic” sabotage at the hands of Russia or other enemies. The British government — which is hiking defense spending — said last month that it will address the threat to pipelines and other undersea infrastructure as part of its review, expected Monday. It comes amid rising tensions with Putin’s Russia, and at a time when Europe is already on alert over a spate of potential sabotage incidents affecting subsea cables and pipelines. But U.K. experts, including former senior government officials, believe the dangers are being underestimated. In an interview with POLITICO, Grant Shapps, who served as both energy and defense secretary in the last U.K. government from 2022 to 2024, said “complacency” about the problem was “genuinely worrying.” “Our undersea infrastructure is a sort of soft belly of British security, and not enough is being done,” Shapps said.  “It’s not a question of if there’ll be a problem at some point, it’s when there’s a problem. This should be a much higher concern for the government. And I don’t just mean that it’s placed on a risk register somewhere. … [We need] a national endeavor, a national plan to protect our undersea infrastructure.” NORD STREAM STYLE Undersea infrastructure is “one area” the defense review will examine, ministers have said. The U.K. and its allies have already increased naval patrols and increased monitoring to combat threats to infrastructure. But while much of the political focus has centered on data cables, security and energy experts warned that the greatest risks could come from an attack on a gas pipeline — like the mysterious 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea. The U.K. is more dependent than most G7 countries on gas to warm homes and provide electricity. More than half of demand is met by imports, chiefly from Norway, and most Norwegian imports come via a single pipeline — the 715-mile long Langeled, which was built in the 2000s and remains one of the country’s vital energy arteries. But while much of the political focus has centered on data cables, security and energy experts warned that the greatest risks could come from an attack on a gas pipeline — like the mysterious 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea. | Stefan Sauer/EFE via EPA “Langeled is our single biggest point of weakness,” said Adam Bell, a former Whitehall head of energy strategy, now director of policy at the Stonehaven consultancy. “It doesn’t mean we would all keel over and die if it were blown up — but it means everything gets a lot more expensive quickly. You move toward a risk of rationing [the gas supply].” While the odds of an attack are “pretty low,” the impact would be “catastrophic,” said Jack Richardson, who was an adviser to former Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho under the last Conservative government and is now an associate fellow at the Council for Geostrategy and head of policy at Octopus Energy. “There is no other way of putting it. If Langeled gets knocked out we’re in massive trouble as a country,” he said. Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow in sea power at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, said Putin’s Russia had “invested fairly considerable resources into capabilities that could be used to sabotage critical national infrastructure.” An open attack on U.K. infrastructure would be an act of war, meaning any such attempt by Russia would likely be covert. But the government should be alive to the risks that might unfold “on day one” of a potential conflict or “in the transition from crisis to conflict,” he said, should Russia seek to cripple the U.K.’s energy supply before hostilities even began. “Given that’s a narrow window of opportunity for them, they’d probably go after areas where they think there are minimal redundancies,” Kaushal added. “Langeled is an obvious example. … I definitely see that as an important part of their approach to the opening days of a conflict or the build-up from a crisis to a conflict.” NETWORK EMERGENCY The U.K.’s ability to weather any attack would largely depend on wider questions of supply and demand, including whether the country was experiencing a cold snap, how much gas was held in storage, and whether more liquefied natural gas (LNG) — super-cooled gas that can be traded around the world via tankers — could be procured on the international market. The U.K.’s biggest LNG supplier is the United States. “The big risk is that you lose Langeled and the U.S. stops sending LNG cargoes, which is painfully plausible,” said Bell. “We could probably endure one but not both without rationing.” The reliability of U.S. support in that scenario is “impossible to know” and “depends on what goes through Trump’s head at 3 a.m.,” Shapps said. If sufficient quantities of gas could not be found to replace lost supply — for example, in the event of an attack on multiple pipelines — a Network Gas Supply Emergency could be declared. These procedures are enshrined in law but have never been triggered since the U.K. gas network was built in the 1960s. Initially, gas power stations could be shut down, leading to power cuts. These could be turned back on again quickly when the gas supply returned to normal, but in more extreme scenarios, factories and businesses — and, as a last resort, some households — could be cut off from the gas network entirely. The U.K.’s biggest LNG supplier is the United States. | Olivier Hoslet/EFE via EPA Energy industry experts, granted anonymity to discuss crisis planning, said in the event of such a drastic step, individual engineers would be required to reconnect each home to the gas network safely. It could take months before the network was back to normal, they said.  Ireland, which is dependent on gas imports from Britain, would also be badly affected. The U.K.’s latest National Risk Register, published earlier this year, contains a “reasonable worst-case scenario” of a terror attack on gas infrastructure that leads to “rolling power cuts lasting up to three hours,” and predicts that “restoration of the affected gas infrastructure could take approximately three months.” Asked what he considered the most dangerous sabotage scenarios for the U.K., Shapps said he was “cautious about saying what my ‘lay awake at night’ greatest fears were, because it would lead somebody to the answer.” “It’s unlikely that all our gas pipelines will be cut at the same time. But [let’s] argue in this case they were and we had zero gas — you’d look to bring in more LNG, you try to compensate in a whole variety of different ways. I think the most serious attack [would be] a really combined attack of energy and on data cables — then you’re in a different level of difficult.” GET OFF GAS The U.K. still meets around half its gas demand through domestic supplies from the North Sea, but the quantities left in the ground are diminishing. Richardson and Bell both argue that in the long-term, the way for the U.K. to guarantee its gas security is to reduce dependence on these fossil fuels. The Labour government plans to cut gas from the power system almost entirely by 2030, but Richardson argued ministers should also “be doing way more on the consumption of gas, particularly for heat.” “The simple answer is, you’ve got to diversify as much as possible, including away from oil and gas,” Shapps agreed, but added that in the short term ministers should drop plans to ban new gas exploration licenses in the North Sea and eke out as much as possible from domestic supplies.  “It is completely idiotic and based on ideology to stop digging our own oil and gas,” he said. A government spokesperson said: “Our priority will always be maintaining our national security, and protecting subsea and offshore infrastructure.  “Alongside our NATO and Joint Expeditionary Force allies, we are strengthening our response to ensure ships and aircraft cannot operate in secrecy near the U.K. or NATO territory, harnessing new technologies like AI and coordinating patrols with our allies.” Gassco, the Norwegian firm that operates the Langeled pipeline, did not respond to a request for comment.

BERLIN — German Chancellor Friedrich Merz vowed to do everything he could to ensure “that Nord Stream 2 cannot be put back into operation” during a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Berlin. The Nord Stream pipelines, which previously carried gas from Russia to Germany via pipelines under the Baltic Sea, were blown up in an apparent act of sabotage in late 2022. Since then, some German politicians have come out in support of restarting the flow of natural gas. The Kremlin has also reportedly pushed for putting the pipelines back into use. In March, the Financial Times reported that Moscow had enlisted a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin to restart gas supplies to Europe via Nord Stream with the backing of American investors. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is working on a new sanctions package against Russia that would also include targeting the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines. While some politicians in Germany have criticized that approach, Merz’s statement today served to make the government’s position clear. Ensuring Nord Stream 2 cannot be put back into use will “weaken Moscow’s war machine” and “open the way for negotiations,” said Merz. The Nord Stream pipelines had long been a source of tension between Germany and Ukraine. Ukrainian officials long argued that Germany’s purchase of cheap Russian gas emboldened Putin and helped fund Moscow’s war machine.