Swedish politicians were on Friday seeking answers after reports emerged of a submarine sighting in Stockholm waters in June, which the Swedish military did not tell parliament’s defense committee about.
Dagens Nyheter newspaper late on Thursday reported that three teenaged instructors and children at a sailing camp in the suburb of Lidingo had spotted the mystery vessel on June 28.
For about 20 minutes, they observed what they believed to be a dark gray or black submarine near the surface and watched it sail away from where they were sailing dinghies.
The teens took photographs and a short video of the object, which Dagens Nyheter published on its Web site.
The Swedish military, which learned of the incident several days later by word of mouth, on July 4 sent two officers to question the teens, aged 17 and 18.
“We are confident about the measures we took when we received this information. But I can’t go into which measures were taken nor which conclusions were drawn,” Swedish armed forces spokesman Jesper Tengroth told reporters.
“The military does not share Dagens Nyheter’s view that this was a foreign submarine,” Tengroth later told the newspaper.
However, he refused to say whether the military had identified the object, and if so, what it was.
The newspaper said neither the Swedish military nor civilian submarines were active in the area at the time of the sighting.
Swedish politicians expressed surprise that they had not been told of the possible incursion.
NOT INFORMED
“We haven’t been informed of this previously. They’ve been sitting on this [information] for several months, they should have sorted out what this is all about,” Liberal lawmaker Allan Widman, a member of the committee, told the paper.
“We are of course going to make sure we get this information as soon as possible. Observations like this should be taken seriously,” conservative Moderates MP Beatrice Ask told news agency TT.
Tengroth said the military would inform lawmakers “relatively soon.”
Alleged submarine sightings are not uncommon in Sweden.
In October 2014, the country launched a massive hunt for a foreign submarine, suspected to be Russian, in the Stockholm archipelago over an eight-day period.
The military subsequently confirmed that “a mini-submarine” had violated its territorial waters, but was never able to establish the vessel’s nationality.
After years of massive military cutbacks in the post-Cold War period, Sweden has in the past few years hiked defense spending, much of it focused on upgrading capacity to detect and intercept submarines.
A non-NATO country, Sweden has also stepped up its military capabilities and exercises with the alliance, including this week’s Trident Juncture 18 exercises, amid signs of more assertive Russian behavior in the Baltic region.
That has included Russian planes occasionally skirting or violating the national airspace of neighboring countries.
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
RSS