Germany says sabotage behind chopping of telecoms cables in Baltic Sea | EUROtoday

The injury of two undersea web cables within the Baltic sea should be seen as an act of sabotage, German defence minister Boris Pistorius has stated.

A pair of fibre-optic communications cables have been severed on Sunday and Monday, in an incident which “immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage”, Finland and Germany stated in a joint assertion.

A 745-mile (1,200 kilometre) cable linking Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working at 2am on Monday, in response to Finnish state-controlled cyber safety and telecoms firm Cinia.

Another cable linking Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island went out of service at 8am on Monday, in response to a Lithuanian communications agency.

A collection of incidents involving Baltic pipelines have heightened fears of sabotage since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Before a gathering with EU defence ministers in Brussels, Mr Pistorius stated: “No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally. I also don’t want to believe in versions that these were anchors that accidentally caused damage over these cables.

“Therefore we now have to state, with out understanding particularly who it got here from, that it’s a ‘hybrid’ motion. And we additionally need to assume, with out understanding it but, that it’s sabotage.”

In the joint statement, Finland and Germany said they were “deeply concerned”, adding that Europe’s security is threatened by Russia’s war in Ukraine and “hybrid warfare by malicious actors”.

“Safeguarding our shared crucial infrastructure is significant to our safety and the resilience of our societies,” it added.

The Lithuanian navy has now increased its monitoring of its waters in response to the damage. Swedish company Arelion, which owns Lithuanian company Telia Lietuva, revealed the cable is fully out of action.

Carl-Oskar Bohlin, Sweden’s minister of civil defence, told Swedish public broadcaster SVT: “It is totally central that it’s clarified why we at present have two cables within the Baltic Sea that aren’t working.”

The Finland-Germany pipeline might take 15 days to restore, Cinia’s chief government Ari-Jussi Knaapila advised reporters at a information convention.

The cable connecting Germany and Finland follows a part of the route of the Nord Stream 1 and a couple of gasoline pipelines between Russia and Germany, which have been knocked out by a collection of underwater explosions in September 2022. German prosecutors are nonetheless investigating the explosion, which has led to recommendations that Ukraine or Russia might need been behind the blasts.

In October, the top of MI5 stated Russia’s intelligence company has been on a mission to generate “sustained mayhem on British and European streets”.