Well except any country on the Eurasian landmass doesn't need submarine cables at all to have direct fiber optic links with the majority of the world's population.
The shortest path from Eastern Europe to Japan would be a straight shot across Russia, but a tracert says that it goes all the way through Europe, through the Atlantic, through the US mainland, through the Pacific and finally to Japan.
A cable through the Arctic ocean between Europe and Japan could potentially cut the journey to Asia in less than half.
Note that while the two options sound significantly different and look significantly different on a conventional Mercator with the page break at the Bering Strait, they don't seem actually that different on a globe, or in terms of difficult geopolitics.
In a couple years you won't need an icebreaker to make the trip...
From Norway to Svalbard to some island between Russia and Alaska. From there to Japan.
It looks very goofy on a map but it's a lot shorter of a distance than expected.
I'm having trouble getting past 4B with terrestrial links.
China + India + Pakistan + Bangladesh + Russia (ignoring spanning the country) + Egypt + Vietnam + Thailand + Turkey + Myanmar + South Korea + Iraq + Afghanistan = 4.002
That's a lot of gnarly land to link.
>> any country on the Eurasian landmass doesn't need submarine cables at all to have direct fiber...
There's a big difference between Nigeria and Egypt, via terrestrial links, to east/south Asia.
I started there.
(Indonesia would have helped, but we didn't want subsea cabling... and kind of hard to get there without)