Arelion — a Sweden-based company, owned by an investment fund — operates communications cables in a “network [that] now stretches 75,000 kilometers across Europe, North America and Asia, and lets you connect directly to more than 2,750 wholesale customers in more than 128 countries.” A quintessential representative of the globalized economy, the company has offices all over Europe (including Moscow), Asia and the U.S., and its cables — which connect all manner of countries and continents — are indispensable to modern economies.
Yet, on the morning of Sunday, Nov. 17, one of Arelion’s cables, which connects Sweden and Lithuania, was cut. Of course, the company couldn’t know something was afoot before the cable suddenly stopped working. “It’s a mystery how it broke,” Arelion’s Chief Evangelist Mattias Fridström told the Swedish daily Aftonbladet. “But I leave that to the police.”
In a happier globalization-era world, such an unexpected cable rupture would, indeed, be a mystery, as most of the owners and operators of the world’s nearly 600 undersea internet cables painstakingly look after their expensive installations, making sure there are no hiccups. But in a world where states are trying to harm one another, and countries like Russia and China prefer doing so by using nonmilitary tools, private companies are suddenly finding themselves on the front line.
According to global insurance broker WTW’s 2024 political-risk survey, last year 69 percent of participating companies experienced supply-chain disruptions due to geopolitical events, and 72 percent experienced political-risk losses.
In many cases, companies themselves may be directly targeted. In recent months, Western logistics companies have witnessed parcel-bomb plots, allegedly instigated by Russia. The CEO of German arms-maker Rheinmetall has been the subject of an assassination attempt, also allegedly planned by Russia. And Western companies are now worried that Chinese and Russian competitors will use nefarious means to displace them from mines and other operations in Sub-Saharan African countries.
On the world’s high seas, owners of undersea cables, pipelines, offshore windfarms and other sea-based installations might be seeing their installations similarly sabotaged for geopolitical purposes too — in fact, that’s what appears to have happened to Alerion. It’s also what appears to have happened to Cinia, the Finnish owner of the C-Lion1 cable connecting Finland and Germany.