The world's largest satellite ground station, on the Svalbard archipelago off Norway, is used by Western space agencies to gather vital signals from polar-orbiting satellites. This January, one of two fiber-optic cables on the Arctic seabed connecting Svalbard to the mainland was severed. Norway was forced to rely on a backup link.
In April 2021, another cable — one used by a Norwegian research laboratory to monitor activity on the Arctic seafloor — was ripped away.
"This could have happened by accident," Norway's defense chief Eirik Kristoffersen said in response to the ruptures, which received little media coverage outside Norway. "But the Russians are capable of cutting cables."