Inside the undersea kingdom: the secret, sinister battle to control what lies beneath the waves

Every day, trillions of dollars, oil and gas and 99% of the world’s web traffic move through undersea pipelines that bear no state’s protection. With superpowers and corporations vying for control, should we be worried about this new wild west? On Christmas Day 2024, six weeks before Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were due to disconnect themselves from Russia’s power grid, a Finnish engineer was just about to sit down to lunch when his phone rang.

He was responsible for the Finnish side of the undersea cables that keep Finland and the Baltic states supplied with electricity, and one was malfunctioning. Within a couple of hours, authorities knew that a Cook Islands-registered tanker called the Eagle S, part of the shadow fleet carrying sanctioned Russian oil, in this case to Egypt, had sailed over the cable at the moment and location at which it had stopped working. The coastguard hailed the Eagle S. Were their anchors up? Yes, they replied – though they did not seem to check – and sailed on. Three hours later the ship hit another four cables in quick succession, nearly…