Sweden has launched a probe after two telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea, one connecting the country with Lithuania and the other running between Finland and Germany, were damaged on Sunday.
“The government is monitoring the events very closely in view of the serious security situation and will be in contact with the authorities. It is very important to find out why two cables in the Baltic Sea are currently out of order,” Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told the Swedish public broadcaster SVT.
Lithuania’s General Prosecutor’s Office is also clarifying details.
“The circumstances are being clarified and information is being collected,” Gintarė Vitkauskaitė-Šatkauskienė from the office told BNS on Tuesday morning.
Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre, said on Tuesday that all versions of the incident, including sabotage or diversion, were being investigated.
“We are collecting all the data from the authorities and from our allies who are in the region and who are monitoring what actually happened at sea that morning or that night,” Vitkauskas told reporters.
According to Vitkauskas, it is too early to say what kind of damage it was, but experts suggest it was not related to a natural disaster or phenomenon.
“Experts say that it’s physical or mechanical damage […]. If it’s mechanical or physical, it’s most likely intentional or accidental due to negligence,” he said.
According to the American broadcaster CNN, the Finland-Germany cable was disrupted around 100 kilometres from the Lithuania-Sweden connection.
“We are deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea. The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times,” the Finnish and German foreign ministers said in a joint statement. ”A thorough investigation is underway. Our European security is not only under threat from Russia‘s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors.”
German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius also said on Tuesday that the damage to two telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea may have been an act of sabotage.
“It looks like sabotage,” Reuters quoted him as saying. “Nobody believes that the cables in the Baltic Sea were damaged by accident.”
Telia Lietuva, a Swedish telecommunications company operating in Lithuania, said the case is serious because Lithuania-Sweden and Germany-Finland cables intersect.
“Here we can see that the cables cross in an area of only 10 square metres, they intersect. [...] Since both are damaged, it is clear that this was not an accidental dropping of one of the ship’s anchors, but something more serious could be going on,” Andrius Šemeškevičius, the company’s chief technology officer, told LRT TV on Monday evening.
In 2023, a Chinese ship was found to have damaged an undersea pipeline in the Baltic Sea after its anchor had dislodged.
In this case, it would be difficult to damage two separate communications cables at the same time, according to Šemeškevičius.
Finnish national broadcaster Yle reported on Monday that C-Lion1, the only country’s submarine communication cable to Central Europe, had been damaged. This was reported by Cinia, the state-owned company that builds fibre-optic networks.
A spokesman said that according to the data available, the cable break “must have been caused by an external force”.
The cable runs along the Nord Stream pipeline route, along the Baltic seabed, connecting Finland and Germany.
Later on Monday, Telia Lietuva announced that a cable connecting Sweden with Lithuania had also been damaged.
Too early to say
According to Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda, it is premature to draw any conclusions on the cause of Sunday’s damage to the communications cables.
Previous incidents involving damage to critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea, however, were linked to both malicious activity and unintentional negligence, he pointed out.
“It is probably too early to come to any definitive conclusion on this, but of course both cases are possible,” he told reporters at the Seimas on Tuesday.
According to the president, the country’s security services are looking into the situation.
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