A few days before Christmas, a Chinese ship started its engines in the freezing waters between Denmark and Sweden and sailed off, leaving a global furore in its wake.

It is thought that the previous month Yi Peng 3 had deliberately severed two fibre-optic data cables lying on the Baltic seabed 100 miles apart by dragging its anchor over them.

“Nobody believes that these cables were cut accidentally,” said Germany’s defence minister Boris Pistorius. Not least when the bulk carrier’s transponder was turned off at the time of the two incidents and there was a similar “accident” with a Chinese ship damaging a Baltic gas pipeline the previous year.

Pistorius talked about a “hybrid” act of sabotage while carefully avoiding blame. This looked like a classic “grey zone” incident, hard to pin down as a deliberate attack by a hostile nation while hovering in that uneasy space between peace and all-out war.

There are reports that the ship’s captain attacked at the behest of Russian intelligence; certainly while it was stopped at anchor, one of Moscow’s naval vessels arrived to electronically snoop on Scandinavian investigators. Despite pledging cooperation, Beijing refused to let prosecutors board the freighter before confirming its departure to “ensure the physical and mental wellbeing of the crew”.

This was far from a unique attack. On Christmas Day, an oil tanker sailing to Russia broke a power line between Finland and Estonia while severing seabed internet cables – those vulnerable links so critical for modern societies.

Yet the Yi Peng 3 incident exposed with the greatest clarity how the dictatorships in China and Russia........

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