Summarize and humanize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in EnglishCritically important yet terrifyingly vulnerable – this is the maritime infrastructure that now stands at the mercy of Vladimir Putin.Britain depends on a vast network of gas pipelines, electrical cables and offshore energy hubs to function, but many of these vital arteries lie relatively undefended in seas crisscrossed by Russian submarines and spy ships. MailOnline has produced a map of the most important components of this system, which includes the 700-mile Langeled pipeline from Norway – responsible for a fifth of Britain’s entire gas supply. With a capacity of 1.4GW and stretching 475 miles, the Viking Link is the longest subsea and land electricity interconnector in the world – yet this too would be worryingly easy for the Russian military to damage. Concerns that the Russians are planning a sabotage operation have escalated since one of their spy ships, the Yantar, was detected mapping the UK’s critical underwater infrastructure in the North Sea in recent months. Moscow has been linked to a string of incidents in the Baltic Sea in the past two years, affecting cable and pipeline links. Germany’s Nord Stream gas pipelines were also sabotaged in 2022.Separately, the Russians are also believed to have placed listening devices on offshore UK wind turbines in an attempt to track the movement of Royal Navy submarines. Former defence minister Tobias Ellwood has warned that Britain is ‘behind the curve’ in tracking Russia’ deep sea operations, while military chiefs said a ‘war’ is already ‘raging’ in the Atlantic.
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Mr Ellwood called yesterday for a significant expansion of the UK’s maritime surveillance capabilities following reports that Russian spy equipment had been seized from domestic waters. He insisted that officials now ‘realise that there is a delta between our resilience and the threat that we face’.’The scale of damage [they could do] is enormous and it’s deniable and it’s cheap to do,’ he told the Guardian. ‘That’s the worrying dimension of all of this.’The suggestion that Britain and the West is already involved in a maritime conflict with Russia was backed up by one senior serving military chief quoted in The Sunday Times. ‘There should be no doubt, there is a war raging in the Atlantic. This is a game of cat and mouse that has continued since the ending of the Cold War, and is now heating up again. We are seeing phenomenal amounts of Russian activity.’A second military source added: ‘It’s a bit like the space race. This is a world clouded in secrecy and subterfuge … but there’s enough smoke to suggest something is on fire somewhere.’As the UK pursues Net Zero environmental targets – leading to the closure of coal-fired power stations – the country has become increasingly reliant on supplies of gas and electricity from abroad in order to ‘keep the lights on’. Indeed, the country is reported to have come close to blackouts during the past winter – saved only by emergency reserves and electricity imported undersea from Denmark Experts warn that Vladimir Putin is waging a ‘hybrid war’ against Britain and the West Pipes at the landfall facilities of the ‘Nord Stream 2’ gas pipeline are pictured in Lubmin, northern GermanySecurity experts have now argued that British households should follow the example of the EU, which has advised citizens to pack a three-day survival kit.This should include water, non-perishable food, medicines, a battery-powered radio, a torch, identity documents and a Swiss Army knife.The protection of critical undersea infrastructure will form part of the Government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) by former Nato secretary-general Lord Robertson this year.A source said: ‘We know that the Russians are active in the North Sea and have the power to cripple our energy links.’We need to become much more self-sufficient, and quickly. And households should be ready for all eventualities.’MPs fear that Ed Miliband’s obsession with Net Zero has made Britain more vulnerable to Russian sabotage.The Energy Secretary has pledged to make Britain a ‘clean energy superpower’ by using fossil fuels for no more than 5 per cent of its electricity by 2030.The UK’s last coal power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, was shut down last September, having run since 1967. The two gigawatts of capacity it once provided was enough to power up to two million homes. In the next few years, the UK is also likely to lose at least two of the nuclear power stations that currently provide a steady supply of electricity and stabilise the entire grid.That will leave the nation even more reliant on wind and solar farms – where production plummets if the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine – backed up by a fleet of ageing gas-fired power stations.Sources say the UK’s power supply is currently propped up by a handful of ships arriving each week with supplies of liquefied natural gas from either Qatar or America.Tory MP Nick Timothy said: ‘The pursuit of decarbonisation at all costs leaves us less secure and with energy prices that are terrible for families and ruinous for business. Ed Miliband is making us more and more dependent on electricity imports.’But interconnectors [high-voltage electricity cables] are exposed and vulnerable to attack by hostile states like Russia.’ On January 8 Britain is understood to have come closer than it has for many years to having to impose electricity blackouts. Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband arrives in Downing Street to attend the weekly Cabinet meeting in LondonFreezing temperatures and outages on some interconnectors and gas-fired power stations meant generating capacity was down at a time of peak demand.Meanwhile, plummeting wind speeds reduced the amount of power that could be generated by the nation’s wind farms. If demand had outstripped supply then grid operators would have been forced to blackout chunks of the country, with analysts reportedly claiming that Birmingham would have been a likely target.The risk only receded when the UK’s energy system operator forked out about £17million to keep two gas power plants from turning off and a high-voltage cable bringing electricity from Denmark to the UK, called the Viking Link, was also switched on early from a planned maintenance outage to provide more power.’We are now massively dependent on electricity imports and we are going to become more dependent on those imports,’ one source said last night.’The director general of MI5 has warned about GRU [Russia’s military intelligence service] tactics in Western countries, including sabotage or arson. Energy infrastructure is a sitting duck.’Fears of Russian sabotage have grown since four cables under the Baltic Sea were severed in just three months.On Christmas Day the crucial Estlink 2 power cable between Finland and Estonia was damaged by an oil tanker dragging its anchor along the seabed. And Defence Secretary John Healey last year ordered a Royal Navy Astute-class nuclear submarine to surface yards away from the Russian spy ship Yantar after it was suspected of interfering with subsea cables in the Irish Sea.The Yantar is believed to be able to deploy a three-man mini-submarine, called Pr1860, which is capable of operating at depths of 20,000 feet. It can also deploy an array of remotely operated and autonomous underwater vehicles that security experts fear could be used to lay explosives on pipelines.The UK’s most important pipeline – the Langeled – runs from the Nyhamna gas processing plant on the Norwegian island of Gossa to the Easington gas terminal in County Durham.It carries up to 26billion cubic metres of gas to the UK each year – more than a third of what the country consumes annually. Dr Sidharth Kaushal, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a defence thinktank, said: ‘Energy in general and gas in particular is an area of acute concern.’I would point to the very heavy reliance on the Langeled pipeline from Norway as being essentially a single point of failure within the system.’A Government spokesman said: ‘Investing in clean power and the economic opportunity it provides will boost our security and bring down bills.’It also removes any dependency on hostile states, which we are countering further in the case of Russia by supporting Ukraine, standing by our Nato allies and disrupting Russian malign activity.’A Government source said that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer intended to ‘reignite our industrial heartlands’ by investing in carbon capture and storage and creating more wind farms.They said: ‘We are focused on ensuring that the UK has the defence it needs, with plans to reach 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2027.’The source added that there were no plans to encourage households to pack survival kits.