German minister suggests cutting of underwater cables is sabotage act

The cutting of two underwater cables in the Baltic Sea looks to be an act of sabotage, Germany’s defence minister said yesterday.

Boris Pistorius spoke after damage was detected to the C-Lion1 telecommunications cable that runs for almost 750 miles from the Finnish capital Helsinki to the German port city of Rostock.

Another cable running between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island was also damaged. Speaking in Brussels, Mr Pistorius said the damage to the cables was ‘a very clear sign that something is afoot’.

‘No one believes these cables were severed by mistake, and I also don’t want to believe versions that it was anchors that by chance caused damage to these cables,’ he said at a regular meeting of European Union defence ministers.

‘So we have to state – without knowing in concrete terms who it came from – that this is a hybrid action. And we also have to assume – without already knowing it, obviously – that this is sabotage.’

The foreign ministries of Finland and Germany had already said on Monday night that the damage raised suspicion of sabotage.

They said in a joint statement that it came at a time when ‘our European security is not only under threat from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors’.

The statement added that the countries were investigating the incident, and that it was crucial that such ‘critical infrastructure’ be safeguarded.

Swedish and Lithuanian defence officials said they were ‘deeply concerned’, adding that ‘situations like these must be assessed with the growing threat posed by Russia in our neighbourhood as a backdrop’.

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Baltic Sea data cable connecting Finland and Germany is broken amid fears of sabotage

The sudden outage implied that the cable was completely severed by an outside force, although a physical inspection has not yet been conducted, Cinia's chief executive, Ari-Jussi Knaapila, told a press conference. 

The damage to the Finland-Germany cable occurred near the southern tip of Sweden's Oland Island and could require five to 15 days to repair, Knaapila said.

Cinia said that most internet users would not notice the outage and that it was likely a result of human activity, although they added that there was no indication that the damage was the result of sabotage.

'At the moment, there is no way to assess the cause of the cable break, but such breaks without external impact do not happen in these waters,' Knapila said. 

He added that a trawler or a ship putting down an anchor due to an emergency could have severed the cable, which is covered in a double-armoured steel casing.  

Swedish public service broadcaster SVT reported that Swedish authorities were also investigating damage to a communications cable running between Lithuania and Sweden, close to the one that was severed.

'It is absolutely central that it is clarified why we currently have two cables in the Baltic Sea that are not working,' Carl-Oskar Bohlin, minister of civil defence, told SVT.

The episode recalled other incidents in the same waterway that authorities have probed as potentially malicious. 

Last year, a subsea gas pipeline and several telecoms cables running along the bottom of the Baltic Sea were severely damaged in an incident raising alarm bells in the region.

Investigators of the 2023 cases in Finland and Estonia have named a Chinese container ship that they believe dragged its anchor and caused the damage. 

But they have not said whether the damage was accidental or intentional.

In 2022 the Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia to Germany in the Baltic Sea were destroyed by explosions in a case that remains under investigation by German authorities.

Located in northern Europe, the Baltic Sea is an active commercial shipping route and is ringed by nine countries including Russia.