VLADIMIR Putin’s shadowy fleet of submarines could cripple the West by cutting vital undersea cables.
The warning comes as Royal Navy frigate HMS Northumberland struck one of Russia’s “hunter killer” submarines in the icy North Atlantic.
The Type-23’s sonar array dragged across Putin’s boat’s hull after the warship was deployed to search for the submarine during the mission in 2020.
It was feared that the Russians would be trying to cut undersea cables that are essential for internet and communication in the UK.
Putin is known to have a number of specialist submarines dedicated to the task.
The vessels are operated by a shadowy branch of the Russian military that answers directly to Putin – with a mission to deliver a catastrophic blow to the West.
The Losharik spy subs are carried underneath beneath an enormous “mothership” undersea Belgorod vessel and are built to lurk at the bottom of the ocean.
They enter the Atlantic by sailing down from the Arctic.
And the vessels then use robotic arms to tamper with or even cut key cables that help keep the world’s economy moving with potentially devastating consequences.
Cutting the undersea cables could be a key element in any conflict between the two sides – especially amid simmering tensions in Eastern Europe.
Undersea cables crisscrossing the seafloor carry 97 per cent of internet traffic with $10 trillion worth of daily financial transactions dependent on them.
Cutting enough of the network in the Atlantic could cause chaos for Britain, with Air Marshall Sir Stuart Peach previously warning such a breach could be “catastrophic”.
It could shut down the internet, cut Britain off from the rest of the world, paralyse financial transactions, and damage communications with the military overseas.
And the US is also under threat, with a report Director of National Intelligence urging Washington to push for stronger protections for the undersea cables.
The US Government is reliant on the cables to transfer information with their NATO allies – and as well as cutting them, its also feared Russia or other state actors could tap into the cables to steal information.
Defence expert Rob Clark from the Henry Jackson Society told The Sun Online “the threat is very real” from the secretive Russian subs.
“Their aim is to retain the credible capability either to disrupt or destroy the cables that the UK’s economy and its entire communications rely on,” he warned.
“Even slightly damaged that can cause untold chaos and disruption to the UK.”
And the cables are not hard to find, with their locations being open to the public as global shipping networks have to be aware of their locations.
The dire warning comes as it emerged the threat is being taken so seriously that the Royal Navy has recently ordered a special surveillance ship to protect cables from the Russians.
And one US submariner even described to The Sun Online how he witnessed the Russians practicing lifting the cables in a dress rehearsal for cutting them during any showdown with the West.
The concentration of cables in chokepoints means any disruption is likely to hit hard, as an earthquake under the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines showed in 2006.
The quake severed six out of the seven cables used to distribute internet and phone services from North America to Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and South Korea.
That led a 100 per cent internet outage to Hong Kong and South East Asia, cutting off millions of citizens and businesses from internet and mobile phones.
It has been estimated that cutting three cables could lead to some countries losing 70 per cent of their data traffic.
The impact of any outage on that scale would severely damage the world financial system.
Globally, it has been estimated an average of 15 million transactions a day are wholly reliant on undersea cables alone.
Now Chancellor Rishi Sunak MP penned a paper on the threat in 2017 in which he warned of “full-scale outages” caused by the cable cutting and coordinated sabotage is a “major threat to the UK”.
“A successful attack would deal a crippling blow to Britain’s security and prosperity,” he wrote.
