German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters in Brussels on Tuesday, the 19th of November, at a meeting of the Council of the European Union that “nobody believes” that two telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea were “cut accidentally”, but that it was not known who was responsible, according to Politico and the BBC.
A 1 170km telecommunications cable between Finland and Germany was severed in the early hours of Monday morning, and a 218km internet cable between Lithuania and the Swedish island of Gotland was severed on Sunday.
“Without knowing exactly who did it, we have to conclude that this is an act of hybrid warfare and we also have to assume that it is sabotage,” Pistorius said.
The suspected case of sabotage comes as European foreign ministers, meeting in Warsaw on Tuesday, warned that Russia is “systematically attacking” Europe’s security architecture.
“Moscow’s escalating hybrid activities against NATO and EU countries are also unprecedented in their variety and scale, creating significant security risks,” the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Spain and the U.K. said in a joint declaration.
The Finnish company Cinia said on Monday it was investigating the damage to a submarine cable linking Santahamina, near Helsinki, to the city of Rostock in Germany, which caused political uproar in Berlin and Helsinki.
Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were “deeply concerned about the severed submarine cable” C-Lion1 and were investigating “an incident that immediately raises suspicions of deliberate damage”, adding that European security was threatened by the Russian war “as well as by hybrid warfare by malicious actors”.
Cinia, a Finnish telecoms and cyber security company, said its cable may have been severed “by an external force”. “Breaks of this kind do not happen in these waters without external influence,” a spokesman told local media.
The 1 173km-long cable follows a similar route to the Russian-German Nord Stream gas pipeline, which exploded in an apparent act of sabotage in September 2022.
Cinia’s CEO said the damage occurred near the Swedish island of Öland and could take five to 15 days to repair.
Arelion, which operates the line to Lithuania, has not said where its cable was cut, but expects repairs to take a few weeks. The two cables cross in the Baltic Sea, although the damage is believed to have occurred elsewhere.
Sweden’s civil protection minister, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, said it was “absolutely essential” to find out why the two cables were severed. About a fifth of Lithuania’s internet capacity has been cut, although consumers are known to be unaffected
Martin Sjogren of Arelion acknowledged that fishing boats sometimes damage cables in the Baltic Sea, but pointed out that the recent incident occurred at an unusual time and its cause is still unclear.
Samuli Bergstrom, a Finnish government cyber-security expert, said that the damage to the cable from Finland to Germany did not affect internet traffic as other cable routes were available.