September 16, 2026 | Policy Brief
Russia Is Practicing Attacks on Undersea Cables in the Arctic. The Consequences Could Reach Space.
September 16, 2026 | Policy Brief
Russia Is Practicing Attacks on Undersea Cables in the Arctic. The Consequences Could Reach Space.
Hidden underneath the frigid Arctic waters, Moscow is rehearsing attacks on allied infrastructure.
According to a September 10 Reuters report, U.S., UK, and Norwegian forces disrupted a covert Russian operation near Norway’s Svalbard archipelago in spring 2026. Russian deep-sea submersibles simulated deploying technology designed to disable undersea cables during a potential conflict with NATO.
For Washington, this is not simply a European problem. The targeted cables connect SvalSat, a major satellite ground station, to mainland Norway. SvalSat supports NASA’s communications architecture, meaning an attack beneath Arctic waters could disrupt U.S. space missions.
Moscow Is Perfecting Sabotage Operations
Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, known by its Russian acronym GUGI, conducted the operation. GUGI is a secretive Russian military unit that reports directly to the president and defense minister and specializes in reconnaissance and sabotage.
The Svalbard operation follows earlier surveillance of allied infrastructure. In April, the United Kingdom and Norway disclosed that allied forces had spent more than a month tracking two GUGI submarines near undersea infrastructure in the North Atlantic.
But what makes it a gray war is the difficulty in attribution. In 2022, one of Svalbard’s two fiber cables broke after suffering physical damage. Shipping data showed a Russian trawler repeatedly crossing the cable beforehand and Norwegian investigators found seabed marks consistent with the dragging of an anchor or net along the seabed. However, no concrete evidence could be linked between the cable damage and the Russian vessel.
Space Missions May Be Threatened
The two fiber-optic cables connect the SvalSat ground station and customers elsewhere. SvalSat’s location makes it particularly valuable for polar-orbiting satellites. Its antennas receive large volumes of weather, Earth-observation, and other data, and send commands back to spacecraft. Norway says SvalSat supports civilian and military missions.
NASA lists KSAT Svalbard as a commercial ground station in its Near Space Network, a system of government and commercial antennas and relay satellites that connect spacecraft to mission operators. The space communications network supports more than 100 missions, including human spaceflight, science missions, and launches.
NASA increasingly relies on commercial communications infrastructure for near-Earth missions, so understanding and protecting supporting infrastructure, like undersea cables, becomes part of operational security.
Enhance Allied Seabed-to-Space Defenses
NATO already maps critical undersea infrastructure vulnerabilities, while the alliance’s Task Force X-Arctic is testing linked networks of autonomous sensors and drones that can continuously monitor activity across the High North. The alliance should explicitly focus on Svalbard’s cables and use Task Force X-Arctic’s 2027 planned demonstration to acquire and integrate successful surveillance systems. Norway should increasingly lead allied Arctic-related efforts, with U.S. support, due to its key regional location and experience with Russian gray-zone warfare.
Under Arctic Sentry, an “enhanced vigilance activity” focused on improving allied surveillance, deterrence, and defenses in the Arctic, NATO should conduct regional exercises that simulate cross-domain failures, such as the loss of an undersea cable that supports military satellites. That would force the alliance to practice maintaining and recovering space operations under attack. NASA should also conduct a parallel vulnerability assessment and catalogue missions that rely on foreign or commercial infrastructure and highlight dependencies, potential impacts to U.S. missions, and ways to improve operational security and resilience.
Russia is exploiting the seams between maritime, communications, and space infrastructure. To counter this pervasive threat, the United States and NATO must understand how disruption in one domain can cascade into others and defend these systems as interconnected — not isolated — networks.
Emmerson Overell is a project coordinator at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where she researches threats to U.S. and allied security in the Arctic, space, and cyberspace. For more analysis from Emmerson and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on X @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.