Sweden says undersea telecoms link to Estonia damaged
An undersea telecommunications cable between Sweden and Estonia has been damaged, the Swedish government has said, the second such incident to be reported in the region in a week.
Sweden’s civil defence minister, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, said the damage to the cable appeared to have happened at around the same time as an undersea gas pipeline and telecoms cable between Finland and Estonia were damaged on 8 October.
“We are currently unable to assess what has caused this damage. It is not a total cable break but it is a partial damage to the cable,” Bohlin said at a press conference in Gothenburg on Tuesday.
He added: “We can establish that this damage has occurred in time and space, close to the reported damage to the gas line.”
The government had received information from “partners and our authorities” about the damage in recent days, Bohlin said.
Last Friday the Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, warned of the vulnerability of “a spaghetti of cables, wires, infrastructure on the seabed” in a meeting of leaders of the UK-led joint expeditionary force in Gotland.
“It is absolutely fundamental for data traffic, so the vulnerabilities today are much, much greater,” he said.
Damage to a gas pipeline in the Gulf of Finland was discovered last week, which then led to the discovery of damage to a data cable. A preliminary investigation into sabotage is under way.
Helsinki has said it cannot exclude the possibility that a “state actor” was behind last week’s discovery amid what its national security intelligence service called “significantly deteriorated” relations with Russia.
Vladimir Putin has dismissed any suggestion that Russia was behind the damage as “rubbish”.
The latest incident was not in Swedish territorial waters or within the economic zone, but the defence minister, Pål Jonson, said Sweden’s security situation had worsened. He said increased vigilance had been in place since the Nord Stream explosions last year.
“We don’t know what caused this injury, but we can’t rule anything out,” Jonson said.
Adm Ewa Skoog Haslum, the chief of the Swedish navy, said the dynamics in Swedish waters were in “new times”. She said: “It is a very intensive situation we have out at sea. There is a lot of movement on the surface and all that happens under the surface is deniable.”
Lena Lindgren Schelin, the general director of the Swedish coastguard, said it had a strong maritime presence. “We have an increased intensity in our cooperation internationally,” she said.