The Danish Navy said on Wednesday that it is monitoring a Chinese cargo ship in the Baltic Sea following investigations by several countries into damaged submarine telecommunications cables.
The Danish Defence can confirm that we are present in the area ear the Chinese ship Yi Peng 3,” the armed forces said in a post on X, adding that it would not comment further on the subject for the time being.
The Financial Times (FT) reported earlier on Wednesday that Sweden is seriously investigating the possible role of a Chinese ship in damaging two cables in the Baltic Sea.
The 2001-built cargo ship, owned by the Chinese company Ningbo Yipeng Shipping Co, stopped in the Strait of Kattegat between Denmark and the south-western coast of Sweden on the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, according to data from the shipping monitoring website Marinetraffic.
According to the website, the Chinese freighter, which was on its way from Russia to Egypt on November 17–18, was sailing close to cables connecting Lithuania and Sweden and Germany and Finland. It was then that these undersea cables were damaged.
However, there is no concrete evidence that the vessel was involved in these incidents.
Further reading
Hybrid attack?
The telecommunications company Telia Lietuva reported that one of the three Baltic Sea communication between Sweden and Lithuania was damaged on Sunday morning.
This information was later confirmed by officials in Stockholm.
The Finnish operator Cinia announced on Monday that a cable linking the port of Helsinki and the German port of Rostock has been cut for unknown reasons.
Germany and Finland subsequently announced that they had launched an investigation and warned of the threat of “hybrid warfare”.
On Tuesday, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said that the damage to two submarine cables in the Baltic Sea should be considered as sabotage, although it is still unclear who was responsible.
“No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally. I also don’t want to believe in versions that these were anchors that accidentally caused damage over these cables,” Pistorius said ahead of a meeting with EU defence ministers in Brussels.
The Lithuanian Prosecutor General’s Office said on Tuesday it opened an investigation into a possible terrorist attack.
Kremlin dismisses accusations
Lithuanian politicians have voiced suspicions that the incidents are Russian sabotage, while the country President Gitanas Nausėda said it was too early to draw conclusions.
Officials in Nordic countries and Germany have also indicated they think this to be a sabotage by Russia.
The Kremlin on Wednesday said these suggestions were absurd and ridiculous.
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