Rep. Waltz Comments on Losharik Submarine Fire

Freshman Florida Rep. Michael Waltz (R) stopped by Fox News to discuss Russian Intelligence gathering and reports of the Losharik Russian spy submarine fire that killed 14 senior sailors last week.

At the funeral on Sunday for the sailors, Captain Sergei Pavlov commented that the sailors had died preventing a “planetary catastrophe.”

Pavlov praised the men, explaining that “with their lives, they saved the lives of their colleagues” and also “saved the vessel.” However, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, has refuted the possibility of any “planetary catastrophe” taking place.

Since the funeral, new findings have revealed that the submarine may have been designed to cut undersea internet cables, and Rep. Waltz shared his thoughts on what the submarine could have been involved in.

In his comments, Waltz detailed that “most people think the internet is in the cloud. It’s really under the ocean.”

Moreover, “there are almost 400 of these cables [which] are about the size of a really large garden hose that run several hundred thousand miles and our entire modern economy is dependent on these fiber optic cables, from banking, to insurance, to financial markets.”

In response to a possible attack on the United States, Waltz clarified that “both the Russians and the Chinese have made it clear in their national security strategy that they are not going to take the United States on tank-to-tank or aircraft carrier-to-aircraft carrier.”

He added that what they’re going to do is “attack us asymmetrically – that’s attacking us in cyber space, undermining our confidence in our elections, or in this case – and what this sub was [very likely] doing was tapping into these cables to collect data and gather intel.”

Last Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin referred to the death of the sailors as a “great loss,” he canceled a scheduled event and he called for an important meeting with his defense minister, Sergei Shoigu.