Sub hunt dredges Cold War tensions
Swedes search for mysterious vessel off Stockholm waters; Moscow vehement in denials
It is like a scene from the Cold War: the sighting of a suspicious underwater object in the waters off Stockholm forces Swedish military forces to launch their largest search operation for decades.
To add extra spice to the affair, a Swedish newspaper reports that the mobilization of ships, troops and helicopters is in response to the interception of an encrypted message from a stricken Russian submarine to its fleet headquarters in the Baltic Sea.
The claim that a Russian boat is responsible for sparking the alert is immediately denied in Moscow, where the defence ministry insists its submarines and ships are fulfilling their normal patrol duties and that there have been “no failures or accidents”.
But given the way the Russian authorities lied about the Kursk disaster in 2000, when a Soviet-era submarine exploded with the loss of all 118 crew on board, Western officials are reluctant to take Moscow’s protestations of innocence at face value. On that occasion, it was several weeks before the Russians made a public admission of the disaster, even though the explosion registered on equipment normally used for monitoring earthquakes.
Sweden’s armed forces said on Sunday that an unidentified “foreign vessel” had been spotted surfacing in stretches of water 50 kilometres east of Stockholm that morning, and twice on Friday. On Saturday, a respected Swedish newspaper reported that intelligence officials had picked up a distress call on a frequency used by Russians.
On Monday, Sweden widened its naval search for the suspected Russian submarine. Military ships swept south through the Stockholm archipelago, a network of rugged islands that spreads out from the Swedish capital.
The expanded operation — involving up to 200 men, several stealth ships, minesweepers and helicopters — came as reports circulated of a suspicious man in black clothes wading off one of the islands.
Moscow has fiercely denied being involved and said Monday it was probably a Dutch submarine.
“To remove tensions in the waters of the Baltic Sea and to save money of the Swedish taxpayers we would recommend [Sweden] to turn to the naval command of the Netherlands
We would recommend [Sweden] ...
turn to [the Netherlands]
for an explanation,” a Russian defence ministry source said.
That indictment appeared to be dismissed later in the day when the Netherlands said its diesel-electric submarine Bruinvis had been undertaking exercises last week near Stockholm, but was in a berth in Estonia by Thursday, before the first sightings of the suspicious “man-made object” off Sweden.
The sightings provoked claims that the Russians were up to their old Cold War tricks of conducting clandestine submarine operations — an indication of the deep level of distrust that now exists between Russia and its European neighbours.
For the Swedes, the idea of Russian boats violating their territorial waters is nothing new. During the Cold War, the Swedish navy was frequently ordered into action against Soviet warships, deploying depth charges to flush out rogue submarines.
In 1981 the Swedes, who opted not to join NATO at the start of the Cold War, were involved in an 11-day standoff with Moscow after a nuclear-armed Soviet sub was left stranded off their southeastern coast.
With the end of the Cold War, it was generally assumed that the Russian navy no longer posed a serious threat to Western security, particularly after America and its allies spent billions of dollars decommissioning Russia’s dilapidated fleet of nuclear attack submarines.
What the recent flurry of activity around Stockholm shows, though, is that concerns about Russia’s naval activities are once again topping the agenda of European defence officials, with the Kremlin’s ambitious plan to build a new fleet of nuclear-powered subs among their chief worries.
While many European countries are making drastic cuts to their defence budgets, the Kremlin has recently approved the construction of 10 new submarines to add to its powerful Northern Fleet, as part of its ambitious plan to rebuild its armed forces. Moscow is particularly interested in strengthening its submarine fleet because the vessels are regarded as the ultimate in stealth warfare, having the ability to lie undetected for months on the bottom of the ocean, while retaining the potential to wipe out entire cities with a single missile.
This new emphasis on submarine-based warfare is particularly worrying for countries like Sweden, which are in close geographical proximity to the Northern Fleet’s main base on the Kola Peninsula, west of Murmansk, and the smaller outpost in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave bordered by Poland and Lithuania which faces towards Sweden.
Moreover, Russia’s recent military interventions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine have raised concerns that the Kremlin might use its restored military strength to press its territorial claims further afield. For example, Moscow has made no secret of its desire to claim sovereignty over vast areas of the Arctic which scientists believe contain up to 100 billion tons of gas and oil.
Only last month, the Kremlin announced that it was setting up a naval command structure with the aim of protecting its interests in the region.
Niklas Granholm, a senior analyst at Sweden’s governmental Defence Research Agency, said Russian submarines were understood to have made several incursions into Swedish waters in the past five years but the military had kept quiet until the current incident.
Asked if the new alert was due to a Russian submarine, Mr. Granholm said: “Who else would it be? Our Baltic neighbours don’t have the capability, neither do the Finns. Norway and Denmark — not very likely; would the U.S. want to do it, why? The UK? Certainly not. So you rule all those out and it points in a certain direction.”