Seabed War: Russia’s Secretive Defence Units and Undersea Sabotage Architecture

Excerpts:

Beginning in 2023, GUGI started close cooperation with another extremely secretive unit of Russian defence intelligence – the Special Activities Service of the GRU (GU) headed by former unit 29155 commander General Andrey Averyanov. The main specialisation of the Special Activities Service is the conduct of strategic covert operations involving kinetic elements – coups, insurgencies, terrorist attacks and strategic sabotage. Its main methods combine illegal human intelligence with elements of unconventional warfare. The result of this cooperation was the creation, in occupied Crimea, of the 235th Specialist Training Centre, military unit 71712, whose specialisation is the conduct of maritime sabotage using unmanned vehicles, including at great depths.

It is noteworthy that even while Russia is waging a difficult and exhausting war against Ukraine, it does not stop spending its limited resources on creating expensive infrastructure that has no significance for victory in that war, but is extremely necessary in the event of a prolonged conventional war with the West.