Reportedly U.S. Officials anxious About Increased Russian Activities Close to

The remarks follow a New York Times report detailing American military and intelligence officials’ concerns about Russia’s purported increase in naval navigation around undersea fiber-optic communication cables in the North Sea, northeast Asia and off the United States coast.

Relations between the US and Russian Federation have reached their lowest levels since the end of the Cold War in the wake of the Ukraine crisis and recent allegations that Russian Federation targeted U.S.-backed rebels in airstrikes in Syria.

While there is no evidence that any cables have been cut as yet, US officials are closely monitoring the country’s activities along the known cable routes, according to The New York Times.

Weir said the report got prominence “just because United States intelligence made a decision to give a briefing or issue a report”, noting elsewhere in his comments that in case of a global war, the Internet would be a lesser worry for people around the world.

It said the cables carried more than $10 trillion daily in global business and more than 95 percent of daily communications. While the locations of numerous cables in questions are no secret, a few have been secretly laid by the US military. and it’s these cables that USA officials are likely most anxious about. US Navy officials believe that the Yantar is equipped with the means of cutting cables.

“I’m anxious every day about what the Russians may be doing”, Rear Admiral Frederick Roegge, the commander of the U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet in the Pacific, told the Times.

Cutting the cables, however, would potentially cause economic chaos due to the dependence of the West, in particular, on the internet.

While cables are frequently cut by ship anchors or natural disasters and then quickly repaired, Pentagon officials are concerned that the Russians seem to be looking for vulnerabilities at much greater depths where cable breaks are harder to locate and fix, the paper said.