While Russia insists its Yantar is for research, other countries, including Britain, consider it a spy vessel, and it is now causing headaches for British defense officials, writes the BBC.
It has long been believed that instead of exploring the waters, the ship is mapping Britain’s undersea cables, which are used for more than 90% of the country’s data transmission. Now there is another reason for the headaches – the Yantar crew has been aiming lasers at Royal Air Force patrol planes. Shining laser beams in the eyes of pilots is a provocation, and British Defense Secretary John Healey has called it a very dangerous act. Such actions are illegal in Britain and can lead to imprisonment.
Healey’s message to Russia and its dictator Vladimir Putin was stark, saying the British saw the situation and knew what the Russians were doing: “And if the Yantar travels south this week, we are ready.” Healey was making it clear that if a Russian ship enters British waters, the response would be military force.
This is not the first time the Yantar has been spotted near Britain. Earlier this year, a British Navy submarine took off directly in front of the ship to stop it.
The main concern is that the Yantar’s presence off the British coast is part of a Kremlin operation
to find and map all the underwater cables and pipelines that connect Britain to the rest of the world. It is also part of a wider Russian pattern of operations that includes launching drones near European airports and military installations and flying fighter jets into NATO airspace.
As an island nation, undersea data cables are crucial to the British. Gas and oil pipelines connect Britain to its overseas neighbors, such as Norway. Both the cables and pipelines are largely unprotected, and are of great interest to Russia.
NATO has classified undersea cables and pipelines as critical infrastructure. At the same time, they are also points of pressure for sabotage, thus threatening both civilian and military communications.
Retired Royal Navy Commander Tom Sharpe has made it clear what the spy ships do, and
the most obvious is that they hover above critical infrastructure and sniff around the cables
that transmit huge amounts of financial transactions between Britain and the United States every day.
Although Russia calls the Yantar a research vessel, it is part of the Russian Deep Sea Research Directorate, which reports directly to the Ministry of Defense. And more worrying than the high-tech communications equipment is what remains invisible.
Yantar can control small unmanned submarines that can dive to depths of several thousand meters. They can map cables, sever them, or lay sabotage devices that can be activated when the Russians need them. The Royal Navy is experimenting with various methods to eliminate the threat, but critics fear that damage may already be done to the security of the British coast.
The Russian embassy in London has said that Britain’s security is not threatened, and that Healey’s statements are a provocation. At the same time, a war is still raging in Ukraine, which Putin has no intention of ending and which he blames on Western countries.
Read also: “Paranoid psychosis”: why Russian society believes a Western attack is imminent