Taiwan wants to avoid going totally offline if its communications infrastructure is damaged — and it’s asking Europe for help.

Taiwanese ministers visited Brussels and other European countries including the U.K. and Luxembourg in June, seeking support for efforts to build up a more resilient digital infrastructure — and, if needed, a full communications backup. The efforts come amid reports that Taiwan suspects Chinese vessels of cutting two subsea cables, taking down the internet for thousands of citizens.

“We’re preparing ourselves to make ourselves more resilient. Telecommunications of course is very important in terms of resilience for the whole country,” Taiwan’s Vice Minister of Economy Chern-Chyi Chen said in an interview.

Taiwan is “working with partners” to increase its resiliency on that front, he said, citing satellite-based communication systems as one area of collaboration. Satellite-powered broadband internet systems, like Elon Musk’s Starlink and the EU’s upcoming IRIS2-system, have gained attention since the start of the war in Ukraine, which underlined the importance of having a communications backup.

Taiwanese Digital Minister Audrey Tang is in charge of building out a satellite-based backup network; she visited U.K.-based satellite provider OneWeb in mid-June. Her visit was followed by reports, quoting Tang, that OneWeb will provide satellite internet to Taiwan by the end of this year.

Both ministers, however, declined to confirm whether the efforts are meant to prepare for a scenario in which China cuts submarine internet cables to the island.

Asked about the danger of China cutting subsea cables, Chen said that “there’s contingency training,” but added that he didn’t see “an immediate military concrete threat.” In a press release put out after Tang’s visit to OneWeb, it was emphasized that Taiwan faced “uncertainties such as earthquakes and foreign forces for years.”

“In the event of an emergency, it is likely that Taiwan may suffer a communication disruption caused by a damaged submarine cable,” the release said.

OneWeb is not the only European satellite provider that Taiwan is approaching. During a visit to Brussels at the end of June, Tang mentioned that the country is already working with the Luxembourgish satellite network provider SES. That partnership centers around a request by the Taiwanese government to “rapidly restore cloud services in a disaster scenario” for which SES and Microsoft came up with a private 5G network.

Networks on the ground can be cut off abruptly, especially in regions prone to disasters, said Suzanne Ong, who manages SES’ media relations. In a demo, Taiwan’s fire department concluded that it could rely on the satellite network to respond in case of disaster, she added.

Chen said that there were “satellite collaboration projects with European countries,” but didn’t specify which ones. Last week, Lithuania, a longtime China hawk, released a new Asia strategy in which it said it wanted to bolster its cooperation with Taiwan on technology and resiliency.

Taiwan has also urged the EU to work together on cybersecurity topics, keeping each other in the loop on certain threats. “If there’s like several threats targeting the different ecosystems, we can set up threat indicator sharing,” Tang said at an event in Brussels at the end of June.

Tang also had a meeting that day with the Commission’s directorate general for communications networks. The Commission did not comment on whether possible Taiwanese involvement in the EU’s satellite-based backup network came up during the meeting.

The Commission didn’t respond to a request for comment.