Russian subs threaten North Sea cabling, MSP warns

The security of North Sea energy infrastructure and the defence costs of any constitutional change were raised on the floor of the Scottish Parliament during a debate on Scotland’s energy on 28 May 2026.

The points came from Scottish Labour MSP Michael Marra during a debate held on a Scottish Government motion in the name of Stephen Gethins, the Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Energy, titled “It’s Scotland’s energy.”

While the debate centred on where energy decisions should be made and on the make-up of the country’s generation mix, Marra used part of his contribution to link energy security directly to defence of the assets that underpin it.

Marra argued that subsea infrastructure in the North Sea must be treated as a defence priority. “We know that our North Sea assets, in which Russian submarines have threatened cabling in recent weeks, must be a defence priority,” he told the chamber. He set that threat against the constitutional question running through the debate, arguing that “the extraction of Scotland from the UK defence capacity would require those further costs to be met at a time when investment must increase rather than decrease.”

The exchange grew sharper when Gethins intervened with a single-word challenge, asking “Why?” after Marra said he found it difficult to follow ministerial arguments about security of supply that placed it inside Europe but outside the United Kingdom. Marra answered by pointing to the North Sea assets and the threat to cabling as the reason, talking about the protection of that infrastructure as bound up with the wider defence relationship across the United Kingdom.

A series of incidents involving subsea cables in European waters over the past two years has prompted the UK and allied navies to step up patrols and surveillance around critical seabed infrastructure, and the North Sea, dense with energy links and interconnectors, sits at the centre of that.