‘There is no fish’: The Russian vessels raising spy fears in Europe
Trawlers, Not Just Trawlers: How Russian Fishing Fleets Are Becoming Europe's Spy Problem
Poinews.com – Across European waters, vessels flying Russian flags and hauling nets for cod and crab are doing something far more consequential than catching seafood. According to multiple analysts and officials, a growing number of these boats serve as fronts for Moscow's intelligence apparatus, gathering data on undersea cables, energy pipelines, and other critical infrastructure along the continent's coastlines.
From Blacklist to Sanctions
In May 2025, the European Commission added two Russian fishing enterprises — Norebo JSC and Murman Sea Food — to its sanctions list. The rationale was not poor catch quotas or regulatory violations. Brussels determined that both companies were embedded within a state-sponsored surveillance operation responsible for espionage missions and acts of sabotage targeting vital infrastructure, subsea cables included. Norway followed suit several months later, imposing its own sanctions on the pair. Foreign minister Espen Barth Eide warned at the time that such operations could set the stage for further sabotage incidents down the line. Norebo JSC has publicly denied both sets of allegations.
Brussels Confirms the Pattern
A full year after the initial blacklisting, European Commissioner for Fisheries and Oceans Costas Kadis made the Kremlin's role explicit. Speaking to the Financial Times in May, he confirmed that Moscow was deploying trawlers as instruments of intelligence collection.
"We are aware that Russia is involved in illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing activities, as well as espionage, mapping of critical infrastructure and sabotage activities. This raises security concerns."
Kadis's remarks were echoed by a chorus of maritime and security specialists who told Euronews that numerous Kremlin-linked vessels continue to cruise near European shorelines under the guise of commercial fishing while, in practice, collecting intelligence and inflicting damage on essential subsea infrastructure.
A Long History of Fishermen-Spies
Erlend Heier, a hybrid-warfare specialist at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, notes that the practice is hardly novel. Nearly every major naval power — Moscow, Washington, Beijing — has for decades employed operatives disguised as fishermen to run covert operations. Listening equipment has been recovered from fishing boats dating back to before the Cold War, and the open deck of a trawler offers ideal concealment beyond what nets and rods provide.
"In 1940, you had German soldiers dressing as civilians on fishing vessels entering Oslo the day before the full-scale invasion. Norway did it, the United States did it, the United Kingdom did it. Most states with a naval maritime area have done something like this."
What Changed After 2022
What distinguishes the current period, Heier argues, is scale and intent. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, intelligence-gathering aboard these fishing platforms has intensified markedly and grown more aggressive. Operations have drifted past mere undersea surveying into what appears to be deliberate damage to key maritime infrastructure in the North Sea and Baltic Sea, including repeated cable cuts.
"This is all part of the wider hybrid grey zone campaigns to essentially destabilise Norway and European societies. The targets are now civilian critical undersea infrastructure instead of solely surveying military exercises and ports."
NATO's Assessment
James Appathurai, NATO's senior expert on cyber and hybrid threats, characterised these activities as the single most active threat facing Western infrastructure. In a 2024 interview with Euronews, he explained that Moscow runs what it internally calls the Russian Undersea Research Program — a well-funded paramilitary apparatus dedicated to charting every cable and energy pipeline beneath Western waters.
"The Russians are carrying out a program they have had for decades. It's called the Russian Undersea Research Program, which is a euphemism for a paramilitary structure, very well-funded, that is mapping out all of our cables and our energy pipelines."
After a significant cable-cutting episode at the close of 2025, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte publicly acknowledged a "concerted campaign" of hybrid warfare unfolding in the Baltic Sea and committed the alliance to greater support. He stressed that protecting such infrastructure "is of utmost importance," pointing to pipeline-borne energy supplies and the fact that roughly 95 per cent of global internet traffic transits undersea cables.
Tracking the Loiterers
Mariia Vladymyrova, a Copenhagen-based scholar whose work sits at the intersection of Russian maritime activity and foreign policy, told Euronews that pinning down a reliable count of Russian fishing boats engaged in espionage within European waters remains difficult. She does believe, however, that their numbers are climbing. Open-source monitoring and anecdotal reporting corroborate the picture: certain vessels display "navigational" and "loitering" signatures — the latter describing prolonged stationary presence in a given area without departure.
Investigative outlets including Follow The Money have published granular analyses tracking these loitering episodes, demonstrating that fishing boats operating in European waters are statistically the most likely to circle in place, drift without purpose, or follow routes that depart sharply from normal commercial patterns. Much of the observed behaviour admits a benign explanation; some of it does not. Vladymyrova cited an anecdote from a Belgian officer concerning a Chinese vessel in whic
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