German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius yesterday said that damage to two undersea data cables in the Baltic Sea has to be investigated as an act of sabotage, pointing to Russia as posing a hybrid and military threat to the EU.
An undersea data cable connecting Finland and Germany was cut early on Monday by what was likely an external impact, Finnish authorities said, while a nearby link between Lithuania and Sweden was also damaged. All four nations are NATO members.
“This is a very clear sign that something is going on there,” Pistorius told reporters before a meeting of EU defense ministers in Brussels, saying the bloc needs to better protect its critical infrastructure.
Photo: Reuters
“Nobody believes that these cables were cut by accident and I don’t believe it was caused by anchors that accidentally caused the damage,” he said.
“That means that we must assume, without knowing concretely who is responsible, that it was a hybrid action. And we must assume, without knowing for sure, that we’re talking about sabotage,” he said.
His comments hark back to similar incidents in the Baltic Sea since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including just more than a year ago, when the anchor of a passing ship severed two data cables and a gas pipeline on the seabed of the Gulf of Finland.
Russia has denied involvement in any of the incidents.
A reported Chinese probe has said the rupture of the Balticconnector gas pipeline by a Hong Kong-flagged vessel was due to storm conditions, while a senior Estonian official has questioned that conclusion.
The 1,200km high-speed fiber optic Helsinki-Rostock link serving data centers is damaged east of southern Sweden, and there is a high likelihood that it is completely cut, as all of its fiber connections are down, owner and operator Cinia Oy told a news conference on Monday.
Telia Lietuva AB, Lithuania’s largest communications provider, said an undersea data cable linking the Baltic nation with Sweden’s Gotland island was cut on Sunday. The cables cross as close as 10m from each other.
Lithuania’s prosecutors’ office yesterday said it was collecting information on the incident.
“We had seen damages to critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea before,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda told reporters in Vilnius yesterday. “Some of the incidents were malicious activity, targeted activity, some of it just negligence. In this case, it is still too early to come to final conclusions, but obviously both options are possible.”
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