Europe is being forced to confront an uncomfortable reality: the next major security crisis may not begin with tanks crossing a border. It may begin with a severed cable, a paralysed computer network, a sabotaged airport or a carefully planted piece of disinformation. Russia’s confrontation with Europe has increasingly moved into this ambiguous territory. The objective is not necessarily to wage conventional war, but to impose costs, create uncertainty and exploit divisions without provoking the kind of unmistakable military response that an armed invasion would trigger.

That makes the threat harder to deter ~ and potentially more corrosive. The mapping of undersea cables in the North Sea is a case in point. Modern European economies depend on invisible infrastructure: telecommunications cables, energy links, ports, satellites and digital networks. Damage to any of these can have consequences far beyond the immediate site of an attack. A society that depends upon uninterrupted connectivity is also a society with an extraordinary number of points at which an adversary can cause disruption. This changes the meaning of national security.........

© The Statesman