Russia

Russia has been stepping up its submarine patrols near remote locations of fiber optic cables laid on the ocean floor and carrying digital data across continents the New York Times reports.

Pentagon officials and European diplomats speaking on the condition of anonymity compared Russian activities to Cold War levels, when both East and West repeatedly tried to tap undersea cables to extrapolate intelligence, something that is still standard practice among the world’s leading intelligence agencies, although it is rarely talked about in public.

The United States is in particular concerned about Russia’s burgeoning capabilities to interrupt global internet traffic communications by cutting undersea cables in the event of a conflict with the West. Russian submarine patrols have risen by over 50 percent in the last year, according to statements made by senior officials of the Russian Navy.

However, the precise nature of Russian activities remains highly classified. “It would be a concern to hear any country was tampering with communication cables; however, due to the classified nature of submarine operations, we do not discuss specifics,” a U.S. Navy spokesman told the New York Times.

It is also an open secret that the United States, given its technological superiority over peer competitors and the size of its navy, has been the most active in tapping undersea cables across the world oceans and collecting intelligence. 

As I noted in 2010, most people are not aware that our global digital connectivity rests upon a number of fiber optic cables lying at the bottom of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. They wrongly believe that their international communications are carried via satellite links. The truth is that 99 percent of transcontinental Internet traffic travels through these connecting cables; these are the lifelines of our economies.

As I stated in my 2010 analysis:

Most of the cable cuts occur because of ship anchors, natural disasters such as earthquakes or fishing nets. While the technical reliability of these cables is very high, international politics have created three particular problem zones in the world – three cable chokepoints where undersea cables converge and where if cut, outages could have severe consequences. The first is in the Luzon Strait, the second in the Suez Canal­Red Sea­Mandab Strait passage, and the third is in the Strait of Malacca.

One can assume that any of these three chokepoints are closely being monitored by U.S. naval and spy assets and are also of great interest to the Chinese and Russian navies. Russia, however, given that the impact of cable cuts is felt across the world (see here), would potentially hurt its own economy by cutting cables in the event of a conflict.

Consequently, rather than Russia’s alleged new aggressiveness in targeting undersea cables, the real issue when it comes to a cable cuts at one of the chokepoints (and they occur quite frequently) is the repair time.

Depending on how quickly the cable system owner, the operator of the repair vessel, and the national government involved in coordinating their efforts can react, the loss of connectivity might last from a few days to a few weeks. A few countries – such as China and India–are notorious for delaying repair permits if the cuts appear in their territorial waters – this is the real danger to the world economy.

In 2012, I co­authored a study (See: “India’s Critical Role in the Resilience of the Global Undersea Communications Cable Infrastructure”) on how India, through the adaptation of best practices could vastly improve the cable repair times and as a consequence improve its international connectivity. 

I repeatedly have argued in the past, that rather than seeing it as an additional hindrance to improving relations between the world’s great powers, the growing vulnerability of, and at the same time increased dependency on, undersea cables should be used as an opportunity for “undersea cable diplomacy” to bring potential adversaries together. 

It is in the interest of the United States and Russia that cable repair times across the world are sped up, and while tapping undersea cables for intelligence purposes will remain standard practice among most countries with the capability of doing so, the real threat to global connectivity is not so much another nation’s navy but more often the bureaucratic red tape in one’s own country.

To read this piece at The Diplomat, click here.

Russia proposed more than three years ago that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, could step down as part of a peace deal, according to a senior negotiator involved in back-channel discussions at the time.

Former Finnish president and Nobel peace prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari said western powers failed to seize on the proposal. Since it was made, in 2012, tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions uprooted, causing the world’s gravest refugee crisis since the second world war.

Ahtisaari held talks with envoys from the five permanent members of the UN security council in February 2012. He said that during those discussions, the Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, laid out a three-point plan, which included a proposal for Assad to cede power at some point after peace talks had started between the regime and the opposition. 

But he said that the US, Britain and France were so convinced that the Syrian dictator was about to fall, they ignored the proposal.

“It was an opportunity lost in 2012,” Ahtisaari said in an interview. 

Officially, Russia has staunchly backed Assad through the four-and-half-year Syrian war, insisting that his removal cannot be part of any peace settlement. Assad has said that Russia will never abandon him. Moscow has recently begun sending troops, tanks and aircraft in an effort to stabilise the Assad regime and fight Islamic State extremists.

Ahtisaari won the Nobel prize in 2008 “for his efforts on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts”, including in Namibia, Aceh in Indonesia, Kosovo and Iraq. 

On 22 February 2012 he was sent to meet the missions of the permanent five nations (the US, Russia, UK, France and China) at UN headquarters in New York by The Elders, a group of former world leaders advocating peace and human rights that has included Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, and former UN secretary general Kofi Annan.

“The most intriguing was the meeting I had with Vitaly Churkin because I know this guy,” Ahtisaari recalled. “We don’t necessarily agree on many issues but we can talk candidly. I explained what I was doing there and he said: ‘Martti, sit down and I’ll tell you what we should do.’

“He said three things: One – we should not give arms to the opposition. Two – we should get a dialogue going between the opposition and Assad straight away. Three – we should find an elegant way for Assad to step aside.”

Churkin declined to comment on what he said had been a “private conversation” with Ahtisaari. The Finnish former president, however, was adamant about the nature of the discussion.

“There was no question because I went back and asked him a second time,” he said, noting that Churkin had just returned from a trip to Moscow and there seemed little doubt he was raising the proposal on behalf of the Kremlin.

Ahtisaari said he passed on the message to the American, British and French missions at the UN, but he said: “Nothing happened because I think all these, and many others, were convinced that Assad would be thrown out of office in a few weeks so there was no need to do anything.”

While Ahtisaari was still in New York, Kofi Annan was made joint special envoy on Syria for the UN and the Arab League. Ahtisaari said: “Kofi was forced to take up the assignment as special representative. I say forced because I don’t think he was terribly keen. He saw very quickly that no one was supporting anything.”

In June 2012, Annan chaired international talks in Geneva, which agreed a peace plan by which a transitional government would be formed by “mutual consent” of the regime and opposition. However, it soon fell apart over differences on whether Assad should step down. Annan resigned as envoy a little more than a month later, and Assad’s personal fate has been the principal stumbling block to all peace initiatives since then. 

Last week, Britain’s foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, suggested that as part of a peace deal, Assad could remain in office during a six-month “transitional period” but the suggestion was quickly rejected by Damascus.

Western diplomats at the UN refused to speak on the record about Ahtisaari’s claim, but pointed out that after a year of the Syrian conflict, Assad’s forces had already carried out multiple massacres, and the main opposition groups refused to accept any proposal that left him in power. A few days after Ahtisaari’s visit to New York, Hillary Clinton, then US secretary of state, branded the Syrian leader a war criminal.

Sir John Jenkins – a former director of the Middle East department of the UK’s Foreign Office who was preparing to take up the post of ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the first half of 2012 – said that in his experience, Russia resisted any attempt to put Assad’s fate on the negotiating table “and I never saw a reference to any possible flexing of this position”.

Jenkins, now executive director of the Middle East branch of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said in an email: “I think it is true that the general feeling was Assad wouldn’t be able to hold out. But I don’t see why that should have led to a decision to ignore an offer by the Russians to get him to go quickly, as long as that was a genuine offer.

“The weakest point is Ahtisaari’s claim that Churkin was speaking with Moscow’s authority. I think if he had told me what Churkin had said, I would have replied I wanted to hear it from [President Vladimir] Putin too before I could take it seriously. And even then I’d have wanted to be sure it wasn’t a Putin trick to draw us in to a process that ultimately preserved Assad’s state under a different leader but with the same outcome.”

A European diplomat based in the region in 2012 recalled: “At the time, the west was fixated on Assad leaving. As if that was the beginning and the end of the strategy and then all else would fall into place … Russia continuously maintained it wasn’t about Assad. But if our heart hung on it, they were willing to talk about Assad; mind: usually as part of an overall plan, process, at some point etc. Not here and now.”

However, the diplomat added: “I very much doubt the P3 [the US, UK and France] refused or dismissed any such strategy offer at the time. The questions were more to do with sequencing – the beginning or end of process – and with Russia’s ability to deliver – to get Assad to step down.”

At the time of Ahtisaari’s visit to New York, the death toll from the Syrian conflict was estimated to be about 7,500. The UN believes that toll passed 220,000 at the beginning of this year, and continues to climb. The chaos has led to the rise of Islamic State. Over 11 million Syrians have been forced out of their homes.

“We should have prevented this from happening because this is a self-made disaster, this flow of refugees to our countries in Europe,” Ahtisaari said. “I don’t see any other option but to take good care of these poor people … We are paying the bills we have caused ourselves.”

To read the article at The Guardian, click here