Russia's war in Ukraine revives internet connectivity fears among some Asia-Pacific countries, should China sever undersea cables as part of an attack on Taiwan
Context & Ripple Effects
The fear that a great power would target the physical plumbing of the internet is not new: US officials flagged Russian naval operations as possible preparation for cutting undersea cables back in 2015, and a 2021 report documented China and Russia stepping up efforts to control or influence cable routes over backdoor and interception concerns. What changed with Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that cable sabotage moved from hypothetical to plausible doctrine.
That shift lands hardest in the Asia-Pacific, where analysts already warned the conflict could accelerate the fracturing of the internet amid pressure on US tech giants from both Moscow and Western capitals. The region's exposure runs through China: if Beijing treats cable-severing as part of a Taiwan scenario, the same vulnerability Russia demonstrated applies directly to the dense web of cables linking Asian economies.
First-order effects
- Asia-Pacific governments and carriers that route traffic through cables near Chinese waters must now treat cable-cutting as a live contingency in Taiwan planning rather than a theoretical risk.
- Cable consortium members and landing-station operators face immediate pressure to map which national economies depend on which routes, since a single severed trunk can isolate multiple countries at once.
Second-order effects
- Demand shifts toward cable-protection technology: the global scramble to monitor vulnerable submarine cables, including distributed acoustic sensing systems, gains urgency and procurement budgets from exactly these Asia-Pacific fears.
- Routing economics change as states pay premiums for redundant paths that avoid contested waters, reshaping where new cable projects get financed and landed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, undersea cables complete their move from neutral shared infrastructure to contested strategic assets, pushing the internet toward the fractured, bloc-aligned structure analysts saw emerging in Ukraine's wartime connectivity crisis.
- Ukraine's experience — where attacks on the electrical grid strained the mobile network and triggered a global hunt for backup equipment — offers the template: connectivity resilience becomes a national-security expenditure, not a commercial afterthought.
The trend: Undersea cables are being reclassified by governments from commercial infrastructure to strategic assets requiring active defense, with each conflict — Ukraine now, potentially Taiwan next — accelerating the split.