The Swedish military on Sunday presented photographic evidence of a mysterious “foreign vessel” off the coast of Stockholm, but rejected reports of being on the “hunt” for a potentially damaged submarine.
Ever since the armed forces received a tip about a “man-made object” off the coast of Stockholm on Friday, 200 men, several stealth ships, minesweepers and helicopters have been searching the sea around islands about 50km east of the Swedish capital.
“This is not ours; it is a foreign vessel,” Swedish Navy Rear Admiral Anders Grenstad told reporters, pointing to a grainy photograph taken on Sunday morning by a “source” — the third such sighting since Friday.
“He saw something that was on the surface and after he took the picture, it disappeared again,” Grenstad said.
Grenstad said it was not possible to determine the nationality of the vessel due to the poor quality of the photograph — which shows a far-off, dark object jutting out of the sea surrounded by surf — but said the sightings followed a pattern built up over several years.
He rejected media speculation that the armed forces were “submarine hunting” and stressed that the mobilization — one of the biggest, barring purely training exercises, since the Cold War — was an intelligence operation.
“This is not a submarine hunt, using weapons to combat an opponent. It is about collecting intelligence to establish that there is foreign underwater activity,” Grenstad said, adding that an area east of the Swedish capital appeared “to be of interest to a foreign power.”
“Later, there can be a situation where it becomes a submarine hunt. We are not there now,” he added.
He dismissed a report from the daily Svenska Dagbladet on Saturday suggesting that a Russian emergency transmission had been intercepted, indicating that a Russian submarine was in trouble.
“From the information we have, we cannot draw the same conclusion as the media that there is a damaged U-boat. We have no information about an emergency signal or the use of an emergency channel,” he said. “We have not singled out Russia, but [have] said it is foreign underwater activity... It can be a U-boat, a mini U-boat or divers in a moped-like underwater vehicle.”
Grenstad confirmed that a Swedish naval exercise, involving a NATO submarine from the Netherlands, had been under way off the Stockholm coast and further out in the Baltic Sea at the time of the first sightings.
In recent months, Sweden has seen an uptick in Baltic Sea maneuvers by the Russian air force, which has fueled speculation that Russia’s military is now making a show of force against a new, more aggressive, incursion from across the Baltic Sea.
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