NATO allies, including Britain, Norway and the United States, have thwarted a covert Russian operation in the Arctic aimed at testing technology that could be used to damage critical undersea cables.

Axar.az reports, citing Reuters, that the operation involved vessels linked to Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, known as GUGI, which used deep-sea submersibles to simulate the deployment of technology capable of damaging subsea infrastructure.

British, Norwegian and US forces tracked and confronted the Russian vessels near Norway’s Svalbard archipelago this spring, preventing them from completing the exercise.

Norwegian Defence Minister Tore Sandvik said the operation sent a clear warning to Moscow.

“Through our joint operation, we sent a clear message to Russia that they cannot operate covertly,” Sandvik said. “We have made it unequivocally clear to Russian authorities that any attempt to target our critical infrastructure will be detected and met with consequences.”

The incident comes amid growing Western concerns about Russian activity around critical undersea infrastructure. NATO allies have increased surveillance of such infrastructure following several suspected sabotage incidents in European waters.

Two 1,400 km subsea fiber-optic cables linking Svalbard to mainland Norway lie as deep as 2,700 metres below the sea's surface. They carry vast amounts of satellite ​data downloaded at the SvalSat satellite ground station, the world's largest and part of NASA's Near Space Network.