Defence Minister John Healey stated the covert month-long operation didn’t discover proof that Russian vessels had broken undersea infrastructure.
Revealed On 9 Apr 2026
British Defence Minister John Healey has stated that it has tracked and deterred three Russian submarines in United Kingdom waters within the Excessive North maritime area, which is dwelling to key transport routes and close to essential undersea cables.
Healey informed a Downing Road information convention on Thursday that the covert month-long operation involving British warships and army plane didn’t discover proof that Russian vessels had broken the undersea infrastructure.
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Healey defined that the choice to disclose the operation was serving to “name out” Russian exercise and ship a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I’m making this assertion to name out this Russian exercise. And to President Putin, I say this: we see you, we see your exercise over our cables and pipelines. And you must know that any try to wreck them is not going to be tolerated, and could have critical penalties,” he stated.
Healey defined that armed forces had been deployed “to trace and to discourage any malign exercise by these vessels”, including that Putin’s goal was “secret operations that stay undetected over our crucial infrastructure”.
“We’ve uncovered these covert operations. We’ve made clear to him and his submarines that we’ve watched them each step of the way in which.”
In line with the British Defence Ministry, London and its allies had tracked an Akula-class Russian nuclear-powered assault submarine and two specialist submarines from Russia’s Most important Directorate of Deep Sea Analysis (GUGI).
Defence specialists have classed GUGI amongst Moscow’s most secret amenities, liable for submarine ocean monitoring and atomic-powered, deep-water mini spy-subs.
The Russian embassy in London rejected the British authorities’s claims that its submarines posed a risk to undersea cables, state information company TASS reported.
In line with Healey, the Russian assault submarine was a “doubtless decoy to distract” from the 2 specialist vessels, that are “designed to survey underwater infrastructure throughout peacetime and sabotage it in battle”.
They “hung out over crucial infrastructure related to us and our allies within the North Atlantic”.
“We needed to make sure that we might warn them that their covert operation had been uncovered and scale back the chance that they might try any motion that might harm our pipelines or our cables,” the defence secretary stated.
Issues about threats to undersea cables have grown since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The cables join about 99 % of worldwide web visitors, with the UK having 60 cables close to its waters.
Russia has repeatedly denied focusing on undersea cables.
