First step: sabotage investigation after cable damage in the Baltic Sea

The Swedes thus confirmed a suspicion that German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius had previously expressed. Pistorius assumes that the damage to the submarine cables between Finland and Germany and between Sweden and Lithuania was caused deliberately. “Nobody believes that these cables were cut accidentally,” the SPD politician said in Brussels. Sabotage must be assumed. However, there is no evidence for this yet.

However, the first indications seem to point to suspicious ship movements in the region. These movements coincided in time and space with the incidents on the cables, Swedish Civil Protection Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told TV4. This prompted the police to launch an investigation into suspected sabotage.

According to information from the Swedish broadcaster SVT, special attention is being paid to a Chinese ship that allegedly passed the fiber optic cables en route from a Russian oil port at the relevant times.

Information highway between Helsinki and Rostock
One of the cables involved, called C-Lion1, runs 1,173 kilometers between Helsinki and Rostock. On Monday, the Finnish state-owned company Cinia discovered a defect in the submarine line that was commissioned in 2016 and acts as a kind of information highway on the seabed connecting Central Europe to data centers in Northern Europe. The connection partly runs along the same route as the Nord Stream pipelines that were destroyed two years ago.

Cinia assumes that the cable broke at the bottom of the Baltic Sea and was cut by external influences, such as an anchor or a bottom trawl. Whether it was intentional or not – like many things in the case, it is still unclear. Finnish internet users are said to have experienced no major disruptions so far. According to the Finnish Transport and Communications Authority, data traffic would not be permanently disrupted. According to Cinia, repairing the cable will take approximately five to 15 days.

It was also announced on Monday that another data cable, the Arelion communications cable between the Swedish island of Gotland and Lithuania, had been damaged deep in the Baltic Sea. The Public Prosecutor’s Office in Vilnius is investigating the circumstances and collecting information about the damage to the cable that occurred on Sunday.

This cable is said to be quite old and has experienced failures in the past, mostly related to transmission errors. This time, however, one of the suspicious things is that this cable and the C-Lion1 cross at a point east of Gotland.

“We certainly cannot rule out sabotage, as there have been warning signs before. This wouldn’t be the first time and it wouldn’t be anything new,” said Lithuanian Prime Minister-designate Gintautas Paluckas.

NATO focuses on critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines more than seven months later, critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea has attracted increasing attention from the public and especially from NATO. In autumn 2023, the Balticconnector pipeline, a key energy line between Finland and Estonia, was cut and a data cable between the two EU countries was also damaged.

According to Finnish researchers, the pipeline was most likely destroyed by the anchor of a Chinese container ship called Newnew Polar Bear. It is still unclear whether the incident was an accident or deliberate sabotage.