As a life-long sailor, with extensive open water experience, let me try to explain why the Russian sabotage of sea cables is obvious. This is a story about “accidentally” dragging an anchor, in the same way a large truck could “accidentally” run over a Volkswagen and drag it 1,000 miles.
The story comes from a particular tanker called the Eagle S, taken to court over dragging its anchor. On a tanker of its size, anchor and chain together weigh roughly 100 metric tons. Dragging that load demands extra sustained engine power and generates continuous noise through the chain into the hull. The anchor mass and leverage, even swinging free undersea, works erratically against the rudder control and bleeds speed. Prosecutors in court argued that the Eagle S had all these signatures: they experienced falling speed and engine RPM. The crew came up with no plausible excuse to miss these factors. Even more to the point, fuel consumption is an unavoidable concern and anchor drag raises fuel consumption dramatically. On a shadow-fleet voyage that loss is a dominant variable always monitored.
The Eagle S ran one defense in court: the crew never knew the anchor was down, blamed it on winch failure made worse by weather. Basic physics make their claim impossible to believe, and the court did not let it float.
The more annoying line did not come from the ship at all. It came from a European official giving a strange excuse to The Record why drags like this could be an accident: an incompetent master knows the anchor is dragging and will not send crew onto an exposed foredeck in a storm to weigh it. A life-saving heroic decision. On a shadow fleet oil tanker. With disposable crew.
Are you f$%R#%ng kidding me?
The danger of the official European line is what it tries to drop on the unsuspecting reader. It concedes damage was noticed on board, concedes damage was unwanted, and then blames it all on a concern for human safety. They are weaponizing crew welfare on the least maintained, least caring vessels in the world. A tanker arguing they had an accident “because of how much we care about life” is a cynical joke.
Look at it like this: Swedish investigators have reconstructed an incident from the Vezhen ship’s voyage recorder and onboard video. They reported how three independent securing devices held an anchor, with two inoperative for some time. When the last one failed from a wave strike during a storm, the physics described above started to impact the ship. The Swedes say the autopilot compensated for the heavy yaw, and no alarm sounded. Sweden called it an accident of weather, mechanical failure, and poor seamanship. The accident was linked to a lack of care, where safeguards were failing and then gone, buried by ongoing negligence. That’s at least plausible.
The “we cared so much we didn’t care” is absurd on its face.
Now look at it like this: Dragged anchors account for about 30 percent of cable faults worldwide. It’s a thing we have a lot of data on already. A 2008 incident saw a ship drag anchor 180 miles across six cables. That sucked. A single long accidental drag is plausible, but it’s outside the norm because it’s negligent and counter to the variables the captain’s care about like fuel consumption (drag and direction). That’s why five cable drags in just eighteen months in one very particular sea of interest to Moscow is not plausible.
There is an expected baseline near 0.6 per year. One analyst put the observed cluster of five incidents at a once-in-108,000-years coincidence. Any attempt to look at these clustered anchor drags as isolated accidents is ignoring that they are collectively impossible. That’s what makes the “we cared about crew” so much worse as a defense. The high rate cluster isn’t an accident, and neither is “we cared”.
The legal record explains why cause becomes somewhat irrelevant to the undersea cable threat. The Helsinki court did not find the Eagle S crew innocent. It classified the event as an incident of navigation under UNCLOS Article 97 and assigned jurisdiction to the ship’s flag state. The damage fell inside Finland’s exclusive economic zone but outside its territorial sea, which stopped prosecution. Anchor-dragging is indistinguishable from negligence by official accounts, and the coastal-state had to admit incidents are outside their reach.
The Fitburg case gives us a comparison to weigh, because it was caught in the act and inside territorial waters. Their anchor was already damaged before the 130-kilometer drag. Prosecutors allege eight further cables were targeted before the ship was stopped. The coast guard intercepted it in the act, anchor still down, moving from the Estonian into the Finnish zone. Its case proceeds because it had two technical legal conditions the Eagle S did not.
The bottom line is that sailors could understand how incompetence such as lack of care accounts for any one ship in a storm. What does not add up is the regular sequence that indicates someone cares.
The persistence of the accident framing is the thing that dismisses the accident framing. Leaving these cases as unresolved only serves Moscow, which runs its flimsy deniability. European governments apparently want to avoid calling out that there has been a sustained campaign against their infrastructure, and it’s unclear why.
