The European Union (EU) has approved one of its most strategically important energy infrastructure projects: the Black Sea Connectivity Submarine Electricity Cable. Yet while Brussels is offering €2.3bn ($2.6bn) for the program, neither the EU nor NATO has developed a security system capable of protecting it from the type of shadow war attacks Russia has launched elsewhere. The alliance needs to act, and swiftly.
The growing frequency of suspected sabotage incidents, from the Baltic and Black seas to the South China Sea, underscores that resilience in contested waters is no longer merely a critical infrastructure challenge but a strategic imperative. Diversifying energy sources and supply chains remains the most effective long-term strategy for Brussels to reduce dependence on Russia and limit its capacity for coercion. But diversification means little if the new infrastructure cannot be defended, which is precisely the test the Black Sea Submarine Cable now poses.
The bloc does recognize the project’s importance. This year, it designated the cable a Project of Mutual Interest (PMI), a status that unlocks access to EU funding and streamlined regulatory procedures.
The cable will carry renewable energy generated in Azerbaijan through Georgia and across the Black Sea via a fiber-optic submarine cable, and integrate into the EU’s electricity grid from Romania and Hungary.
The project’s strategic importance is threefold: it reduces the EU’s dependence on Russian energy, advances Europe’s green transition, and strengthens the bloc’s inter-regional connectivity from the Caspian Sea through the South Caucasus to southeastern Europe. But this ambition also carries a vulnerability.
Set to become operational from 2029, the cable — at 1,195 km or about 750 miles, and the longest cable of its kind ever built — will run close to the Russia-Ukraine theater of war across a seabed that Moscow likes to lay claim to. That routing all but guarantees Russia will have both the motive and the military capacity to sabotage it (Russia’s GUGI unit specializes in such tasks).
The EU’s Black Sea Strategy and its proposed Maritime Security Hub acknowledge the problem, but neither comes close to matching the defense capacity such an investment demands.
The result is a striking imbalance: Europe is investing billions in strategic Black Sea infrastructure while relying on a regional security architecture that remains insufficient to protect it. NATO should respond as it has with other regional threats by establishing a Sentry mission for the Black Sea. As with Baltic Sentry, established in 2025, and Arctic Sentry, which began this year, Black Sea Sentry would gather allied military contributions into a unified system of enhanced vigilance above and beneath the waves.
The aim must be to establish this permanent surveillance and protection mission before, not after, the first successful sabotage.
There are signs the alliance is inching in that direction. July’s NATO Summit in Ankara produced the now-familiar headlines about defense spending and Ukraine, but one of its less discussed elements may prove among the most consequential for the southeastern flank.
On the sidelines, the defense ministers of Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey signed an amendment expanding the mandate of their trilateral Mine Countermeasures Task Group (MCM Black Sea) to include the protection of critical underwater infrastructure. What began in January 2024 as a joint demining effort neutralizing more than 150 drifting sea mines along key commercial routes since its establishment is now, on paper at least, a standing regional tool for defense beneath the Black Sea.
Yet the mandate’s reach has limits, and one of them runs straight through Georgia. Because the cable crosses Georgian territory before entering the Black Sea, the country’s growing political distance from NATO introduces an additional strategic uncertainty. Georgia, despite being a Black Sea littoral state, was not invited to Ankara, a consequence of its democratic backsliding that leaves a gap in the very corridor the cable depends on.
The timing of MCM Black Sea’s mandate expansion was not accidental. Just a month before the summit, a naval drone exploded inside the Romanian port of Constanța, meters from an oil terminal, one of four such drones that detonated in or near Romanian waters that day. Kyiv acknowledged the drone was Ukrainian, thrown off course by Russian electronic warfare.
That detail should reassure no one. It shows how easily the war’s undertow can reach NATO shores, and how exposed the infrastructure there really is. The Baltic has already offered the playbook: dragged anchors, severed cables, plausible deniability. The Black Sea offers Russia the same opportunities.
The Baltic case, in fact, offers more than a warning — it offers a template. When cables between Finland and Estonia were cut, NATO answered within weeks, launching Baltic Sentry with frigates, patrol aircraft, and naval drones, backed by a dedicated maritime command in Rostock.
The Black Sea has received nothing comparable, even as the stakes grow. MCM Black Sea deserves the same level of allied attention, resources, and surveillance architecture as its Baltic counterpart. A sentry project before the first incident rather than after it.
Nino Lezhava is a research analyst based in Georgia and a Non-Resident Fellow for the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at CEPA, specializing in Euro-Atlantic relations, geopolitical competition, the wider Black Sea region, and the Caucasus.
Antonia-Laura Pup is a research assistant within the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and a member of the CEPA Black Sea Working Group. She previously served as a policy advisor to the President of the Defense Committee in the Romanian Parliament.
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