The underwater war against Russian sabotage
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
Last week a Russian spy ship was spotted off the coast of the UK. The Royal Navy was sent to closely monitor the vessel as it passed through British waters. It’s the latest in a series of incidents across Europe, some culminating in catastrophic damage to critical underwater cables. So what is Russia trying to achieve? And what are the UK and NATO doing about it?
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Guest: George Grylls, Defence Correspondent, The Times.
Host: Manveen Rana.
Producer: Olivia Case.
Further reading: Nato’s underwater war against Russian and Chinese cable-cutters
Clips: The Times and The Sunday Times, parliamentlive.tv, Bloomberg.
Photo: Times Photographer Richard Pohle.
Get in touch: thestory@thetimes.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. |
| 0:06.1 | I'm Manvine Rana. |
| 0:10.3 | Speeches by the Defence Secretary aren't usually a cause for great alarm, |
| 0:15.7 | but when he stood up a few days ago and revealed a series of events that had just taken place off the coast of Britain, |
| 0:23.1 | it sent to chill across Parliament. |
| 0:32.8 | So last week, a Russian, what is officially called an oceanographic research vessel. |
| 0:39.9 | But if I told you that, for example, it spent a lot of its time hanging off the coast |
| 0:44.5 | of Guantanamo Bay, hanging around lots of undersea cables around the British Isles, that |
| 0:49.9 | might give you a better picture of what it actually does, which is what basically the Royal Navy |
| 0:54.9 | thinks it does, which is it's a Russian spy ship. |
| 1:01.5 | And this Russian spy ship turned up off the coast of the British Isles, not the first time |
| 1:06.7 | that it had done so, and entered Britain's exclusive economic zone, started to approach British |
| 1:13.3 | waters. I think it was about 45 miles off the coast of the UK when the Royal Navy |
| 1:17.3 | gently shepherded it away from British waters up through the channel and up out of the North Sea. |
| 1:24.5 | And the RAF deployed maritime patrol aircraft to basically monitor exactly what it |
| 1:29.9 | was doing because basically British patients had snapped. This was not the first time that it had come |
| 1:38.0 | to the UK and it had snapped to the extent that the Defence Secretary took the kind of unusual |
| 1:43.5 | step of going to |
| 1:44.7 | MPs to announce what had happened and deliver a strong message to Putin and say, we see you, |
| 1:51.4 | we know what you're up to and we're not going to stand for it. |
| 1:59.7 | It seems like the Cold War is not only back, it's heating up. |
| 2:09.6 | The story today, the underwater war against Russian sabotage. |
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