When Taiwan seized a Chinese-crewed cargo ship suspected of deliberately severing one of its undersea telecom cables last month, authorities pledged to “make every effort to clarify the truth” of what happened.
Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration said it could not rule out the possibility that China had deployed the Togo-flagged Hong Tai 58 as part of a “grey area intrusion”.
Recent cases of damage to submarine cables around the island and in Europe suggest that proving sabotage, much less holding anyone accountable, may be no easy task.
Since 2023, there have been at least 11 cases of undersea cable damage around Taiwan and at least 11 such incidents in the Baltic Sea, according to Taiwanese and European authorities.
Taiwanese and European authorities have identified China or Russia – allies that share increasingly strained relations with the West and its partners – as the likely culprits in a number of incidents, though they have attributed several others to natural causes.
But so far, authorities have not announced specific retaliatory measures against Beijing or Moscow, though the European Commission has unveiled a roadmap calling for the enforcement of sanctions and diplomatic measures against unnamed “hostile actors and the ‘shadow fleet’”.
Authorities have also yet to criminally charge any individuals or companies despite detaining a number of vessels and crew, including the Hong Tai 58, which was seized near Taiwan’s outlying islands on February 25.
Beijing and Moscow have denied any involvement in sabotaging undersea cables.
“This is what the entire grey zone is about. It’s about being deniable,” Ray Powell, the director of Stanford’s Sea Light project, which monitors Chinese maritime activity, told Al Jazeera.
“You just have to be just deniable enough so that even though everybody knows it’s you, they can’t prove it’s you.”
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