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.”
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
RSS