France, Britain and Norway sent military aircraft to the west Irish coast to search for a Russian submarine last week.
As The Sunday Times reports, the aircraft included a French Bréguet 1150 Atlantic plane which flew off the Clare coast, while a Boeing Poseidon P-8 aircraft sent by Britain and Norway flew off Sligo and Donegal.
The latter aircraft is said to specialise in tracking submarines, the newspaper reports.
Keir Giles, a Russian analyst at the London-based think tank Chatham House, told the newspaper that the effort demonstrated “how seriously” the three countries took the situation.
“It also shows how Ireland is not able to defend itself. The Irish would be involved in this operation if they had anything to contribute,” he said.
Ireland is a “central node” in a network of sub-sea cables crossing the globe, the newspaper says, and European intelligence agencies believe that Russia is preparing acts of sabotage in EU member states in the lead up to the European elections on June 7th.
Russian interest emerged almost three years ago when, in August 2021, the Russian intelligence ship Yantar was spotted off the coast of Ireland, close to the privately owned submarine cable AEConnect-1 running between North America and Ireland and the planned route of the Celtic Norse submarine communications cable.
Read The Sunday Times here (paywall)