Surveilling Putin’s ‘shadow fleet’ Meduza’s dispatch from the Baltic Sea, where a new NATO mission aims to protect undersea infrastructure as tensions rise with Russia
The Baltic Sea handles around 15 percent of global shipping traffic — approximately 2,500 vessels daily, according to researcher Julian Pawlak. A rising number of these ships belong to Russia’s “shadow fleet,” a group of hundreds of aging, poorly regulated oil tankers that Moscow uses to bypass Western sanctions. Following a surge in damage to undersea cables in late 2024, which European officials suspected could be the result of deliberate attacks, NATO launched Baltic Sentry, a monitoring operation aimed at safeguarding critical infrastructure in the region. Reporting from the Polish port town of Gdynia, Meduza in English senior news editor Sam Breazeale boarded a French Navy frigate participating in Baltic Sentry to observe the new NATO mission firsthand.
On January 14, NATO announced plans to enhance its military presence in the Baltic Sea, as part of a new initiative aimed at strengthening the protection of critical undersea infrastructure. Named Baltic Sentry, the mission has no set end date and involves a rotating group of maritime patrol aircraft and ships from NATO member countries, all tasked with monitoring for potential threats and assisting national navies, if necessary.
The new NATO mission comes after a series of back-to-back incidents late last year involving damage to fiber-optic cables along the Baltic Sea floor. As undersea cables expert Katja Bego told Meduza after the first two incidents, the European security community was quick to suggest that the cable breaches were deliberate acts of sabotage rather than accidents, while the telecommunications industry was far more skeptical. “These kinds of faults are not uncommon, and they argue that all the circumstances point to this just being a rather routine incident,” she noted.
The first recent incident involving damage to underwater energy and communication cables in the Baltic Sea took place on November 17, when a cable connecting Sweden and Lithuania was severed. Less than 24 hours later, another cable between Finland and Germany was also cut.
The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany issued a joint statement almost immediately, warning that European security was under threat not only due to Russia’s war in Ukraine but also from “hybrid warfare by malicious actors.” In turn, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius called the incidents a likely act of sabotage, adding that the perpetrators of this “hybrid action” remained unclear. “Nobody believes that these cables were cut accidentally,” he said.
The next day, Swedish and Danish authorities identified a vessel of interest: the Chinese-flagged Yi Peng 3, which had left Russia’s Ust-Luga port in the Gulf of Finland on November 15. China denied involvement, and allowed European officials to board the carrier on December 19. But the ship soon resumed its journey — and officials never publicly disclosed whether any evidence had been found linking the vessel to the cable breaks.
Six days later, on December 25, an undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia broke down. Finnish authorities quickly detained the Eagle S, an oil tanker flying a Cook Islands flag that had also departed from Ust-Luga. The ship is believed to be a part of Russia’s “shadow fleet,” a group of hundreds of aging oil tankers used to evade Western sanctions and sell Russian oil to countries such as China and India. The day after the incident, the European Commission released a statement calling the outage “the latest in a series of suspected attacks on critical infrastructure.”
This was echoed in mid-January by reporting from the Washington Post about an emerging “consensus” among U.S. and E.U. security officials that the incidents were likely accidental.
But not everyone who spoke to the Post agreed that the lack of incriminating evidence was grounds to conclude that Moscow was not involved. Finnish politician and former military intelligence chief Pekka Toveri noted that plausible deniability is a key part of covert attacks, calling the cable breaks “a typical hybrid operation” by Russia.
Since then, other outlets have reported that European officials are “increasingly certain” that the cable breaks were accidental. Nevertheless, Baltic Sentry has forged ahead.
Close encounters
France’s initial maritime contribution to Baltic Sentry was the Enseigne de vaisseau Jacoubet, a light frigate that entered service in 1982, making it one of the French Navy’s oldest active vessels. As of late March, it was one of two ships participating in Baltic Sentry, along with the German corvette Magdeburg.
“Even though the Jacoubet is an old ship, we have all the skills to operate and to be efficient. Because our speed, 22 knots, is high, and lets us patrol in a big area,” the ship’s commander, Octave Le Pivert, told Meduza during a patrol on March 29.
During its approximately month-long voyage, the Jacoubet’s crew of 85 sailors used the ship’s own surveillance technology while also remaining in contact with NATO aircraft to monitor nearby vessels. The ship reported to Commander Task Force (CTF) Baltic, a tactical maritime headquarters the German Navy established in October 2024.
In addition to radar tools, the Jacoubet was equipped with a surveillance UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle, more commonly known as a drone) that it used to get a closer look at vessels exhibiting suspicious behavior, like moving at unusually slow speeds or in irregular patterns that suggest possible anchor dragging.
Whenever this occurred, according to Le Pivert, the Jacoubet would increase its speed and move closer to observe and hail the ship in question. “In order to understand why they are orbiting or just having a slow speed, we contact them on VHF [very high frequency radio systems],” he said. These exchanges were generally cordial, he added, as the crews of these ships were often simply following orders from above.
“Sometimes for the firm or company, it is cheaper to keep your ship at sea with a very slow speed than at berth in a port. So sometimes there are crew members [who apologize] because they need to stay here and are waiting for orders from their company,” the commander explained.
According to an officer involved in these monitoring operations, the crew contacted other ships about suspicious behavior about 10–15 times a day on average.
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While there haven’t been any more suspected sabotage incidents since Baltic Sentry began, the Jacoubet regularly encountered Russian and Russia-linked ships — including ones belonging to the Kremlin’s“shadow fleet.” However, European authorities currently have no widely accepted legal grounds for detaining or searching these tankers in international waters. Some countries were reportedly discussing ways to use international environmental or piracy laws to seize the vessels as recently as February, though the talks don’t appear to have led anywhere.
“We have no authority to interact directly with these ships, but we monitor suspicious behavior in order to avoid environmental hazards or security of navigation problems,” Le Pivert explained. “So if we detect suspicious behavior — sometimes [based on] information from the CTF Baltic — often we increase speed to 22 knots, launch our UAV to observe the ship, and hail the ship in order to provide an assessment about the situation.”
The Jacoubet encountered Russian warships during its patrols, too. “Sometimes Russian units come very close, but the situation is always under control, because we are acting in coordination with NATO aircraft,” Le Pivert said. “We are able to have a clear, recognizable maritime and air picture of the Baltic Sea, provided by NATO via communication information systems.”
To avoid misunderstandings, the Jacoubet’s crew tried to limit communication with these Russian naval ships. “We want to keep our defensive posture and non-escalatory posture,” Le Pivert explained. “Sometimes the Russian aircraft, the Russian units, come very close and it’s not very safe, so we tell them that. And afterward, we make a report [to NATO’s central maritime command MARCOM]. We have no other option.”
Europe looks east
France’s participation in Baltic Sentry comes as part of a larger return to NATO’s eastern flank, with the country increasing its contributions to the alliance’s permanent maritime groups by 350 to 400 percent from 2019 to 2023, according to a 2024 report from the French Institute of International Relations.
According to European defense expert Olivier Schmitt, France’s deployment in the Baltic region is the result of three converging interests. “First, a desire to be perceived as a credible NATO ally and a key actor in European security. Second, [French President Emmanuel] Macron’s personal evolution regarding Russia and the acknowledgement of the direct threat it constitutes to French and European interests. Third, the desire from the armed forces to find a new focus area after the forced French withdrawal from Africa,” he told Meduza.
Of course, Macron is far from the only European official who fears Moscow’s aggression won’t stop in Ukraine. “The belief that Russia will eventually seek to extend its expansionism westward of Ukraine is now widely held within NATO,” Le Monde reported in July 2024.
Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency, his antagonism towards NATO, and his desire to reach a ceasefire deal in Ukraine — though not necessarily a durable one — has only added to these concerns. The defense ministers of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have warned repeatedly that Russia could use a ceasefire in Ukraine to rebuild its military capabilities, heightening the threat to the Baltic region.
“The situation is potentially highly dynamic, both due to American unreliability under Trump as well as facing an increasingly assertive China, and due to the question of ceasefire and potential eventual peace treaty,” Baltic defense expert Lukas Milevski told Meduza. “Yet the Baltic states also remain somewhat skeptical, not unjustly, about Western Europe’s reliability to confront the Russian threat, in both political and military terms.”
After Trump held a phone call with Putin less than a month into his second term, Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer scrambled to assemble a coalition of European leaders dedicated to stepping up support for Ukraine and ensuring durable security guarantees in the event of a ceasefire. But despite talk of more aggressive plans, experts warn that Europe’s defenses remain woefully unprepared.
“Europe, including Western Europe, remains unready for even a medium-scale conventional war,” Milevski said. “Stocks of ammunition remain insufficient for more than a couple weeks at most. I’ve heard from certain analysts that the British Army is not likely to be ready for a medium-scale war until 2034, which is years beyond what European politicians have been saying is the timeline for the resurgence of a Russian threat to Europe.”
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Under these circumstances, Baltic Sentry ultimately serves a dual purpose. “I think we should see Baltic Sentry as a deterrence and signaling mission above all else. If we are going to treat the Baltic Sea as a ‘NATO lake,’ we better show that we are serious about protecting it, which appears to be part of the objective here,” Bego told Meduza.
As for the aim of enhancing the protection of critical undersea infrastructure, Bego said that while this kind of monitoring mission can’t feasibly protect the entire Baltic cable network all of the time, this also isn’t its intent. “[By] being more present, and monitoring suspicious or high-risk activities, NATO countries can both signal resolve and increase the cost of bad behavior,” she said. “It is also good practice for a potential future more serious escalation.”
Be that as it may, Milevski argues that Baltic Sentry also appears ill-defined to the point of being self-defeating. With no hard evidence that Russia was behind the 2024 cable cuts, the NATO mission has “nothing really to respond to,” the defense expert explained.
“There is one mission which might be plausible for it to take on, which is to limit or even stop the activities of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet in the Baltic Sea, but the mission is underpinned by neither political will nor the authority for this task,” he continued. “So Baltic Sentry is left with this nebulous freedom of navigation mission, which is irrelevant for the Baltic Sea and may plausibly even inhibit it from taking on a role against the shadow fleet.”
Still, Milevski believes the operation has positive consequences for the Baltic region’s security. In addition to sending a message, he said, Baltic Sentry also “shifts useful naval and air assets into the area” and has involved training exercises that have “improved naval and aerial readiness in the region.”
An ongoing threat
Despite the reports of a growing consensus among Western officials that last year’s cable breaches in the Baltic Sea were accidental, some experts remain unconvinced that this conclusion is correct. According to Keir Giles, an expert on the Russian military at Chatham House, this idea has been “rubbished by seafarers and maritime experts, who suggest that sheer incompetence cannot possibly explain the pattern of anchor dragging over great distances.”
“When speaking with government officials, I have heard the case made both for these incidents having been deliberate sabotage as well as them being the product of poor seamanship — or something in between,” said Bego, noting that the investigations into some of the incidents are ongoing. “That is the main challenge with these kinds of incidents: definitively proving what happened is always going to be very difficult.”
The contradiction between officials’ reported consensus and the opinions of maritime experts “leaves the question of whether any one country is arguing against treating these incidents as deliberate, and persuading others not to respond firmly,” Giles told Meduza. “Inevitably, that’s sparked suspicion that the United States was playing down the likelihood of this being part of Russia’s campaign of sabotage against Europe, in order not to have to confront Russia over it.”
The sailors on the Jacoubet who spoke to Meduza declined to weigh in on whether the breaches were sabotage, instead emphasizing their goals of ensuring freedom of navigation and protecting critical infrastructure. Le Pivert also noted that the Swedish and Finnish authorities are still investigating the 2024 breaches. “NATO warships just provide assessments and observations to support countries in investigating and understanding, so I have no opinion about [whether sabotage occurred],” he said.
At the same time, all of the experts Meduza spoke to agreed that this question is ultimately of little relevance to the NATO and European response. “[Whether] these cable breaches are deliberate sabotage or the result of wildly implausible negligence, the problem is the same: it is vessels working for or with Russia that are implicated,” said Giles. “It makes sense for Baltic nations to step up surveillance of what is happening at sea, because for as long as these vessels, including those of Russia’s ‘shadow fleet,’ are allowed to crisscross the Baltic unimpeded, the threat of incidents will remain.”
“Even if these current incidents appear to have been accidental, they are still examples of high-risk activity in the Baltic Sea — poor seamanship also poses a risk to others using the Baltic Sea, repeated damage to communications and energy infrastructure comes at an economic cost, and there is always the risk that these ships could cause significant environmental harm,” Bego told Meduza. “The Eagle S, the (likely ‘shadow fleet’) ship involved in the December 25 incident, was carrying large amounts of crude oil — imagine if it had sunk.”
“By cracking down on some of that activity, Baltic Sentry has an important enforcement purpose to serve as well — even if the hybrid aspect of these incidents does not appear to be as central as initially thought,” she added.
Reporting by Sam Breazeale