On Sunday the undersea cable linking Lithuania to the Swedish island of Gotland suddenly stopped working. Although it is not common, it sometimes happens that the nets of fishing boats or the anchors of other vessels can damage this type of cables, through which 95% of the world’s data traffic circulates. The authorities seemed not to give importance to the event until early Monday morning, when the underwater connection between Germany and Finland suffered another cut.
The second cable is much more modern and important than the first. Since its inauguration in 2016 it had not suffered any interruption in service. The German Government has no doubts about what has happened. “No one believes that these cables were cut by accident,” the head of Defense, Boris Pistorius, said this Tuesday before a meeting of EU defense ministers.
“I also don’t want to believe the versions that these were anchors that coincidentally caused damage to these cables. Therefore, we must affirm, without knowing specifically who was responsible, that it was a hybrid action,” the German continued: “We must assume, without being sure, that it was sabotage.”
The two consecutive cuts “are a clear sign that something is happening here,” he said. The possibility of Russia carrying out hybrid actions of this nature has been on the table since the Ukrainian war began in 2022. Underwater cables are a critical piece for the global Internet, as they are significantly faster and more reliable than connectivity by satellite, in addition to having greater transmission capacity.
It is a robust but tremendously exposed infrastructure. The cable that linked Rostock to Helsinki runs for about 1,200 kilometers across the bed of the Baltic Sea. The outage occurred southeast of Öland, a Swedish island, beyond the usual shipping routes, local media have explained, near where it intersects with the damaged cable on Sunday. It is owned by Cinia, the Finnish public telecom company.
The cables do not have specific protection. “Both the ducts and the cable itself, which is armored to prevent cuts, are protected from physical and logical sabotage from the mooring station itself to its entrance to the sea. From 200 nautical miles they are usually international waters and we can only verify cuts or attempted cuts,” sources from the telecommunications sector explained to elDiario.es.
Ships are not allowed to stop near the cables, which are recorded on maritime charts. However, this can only be detected if the ship has its beacons activated, which would be difficult to happen if your objective is to attack it. The cable, by itself, does not detect if something is approaching it. To protect them, 10 northern European countries formed a joint military fleet last year.
The German and Finnish foreign ministries have issued a joint statement announcing that they will carry out a “thorough investigation.” “The fact that an incident of this nature immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage says a lot about the volatility of our times,” they highlight: “Our European security is not only threatened by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also by the hybrid war of malicious actors. Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security.”
However, these types of hybrid actions are characterized by being almost impossible to trace. The best example is the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, which occurred in September 2022, which transported natural gas from Russia to Europe through the Baltic. The explosions were also described as deliberate acts and generated international tensions due to uncertainty about those responsible and the impact on European energy security. The only three detainees are Ukrainian citizens.
In this case, the cable cuts have not generated major setbacks in connectivity, since these types of connections are usually strengthened with redundancies that prevent the network from going down due to the loss of a cable. Despite this, Lithuanian citizens did have connection problems for a few hours, as reported by Telia, the country’s main telecommunications company.
Sweden investigates the movements of a Chinese ship
Swedish authorities reported this Thursday that they have detected that a Chinese ship sailed near the two damaged cables. The country’s Prosecutor’s Office points out that the Yi Peng 3, a ship registered in China that set sail from the Russian port of Ust-Luga to Egypt, passed near the Swedish-Lithuanian and Finnish-German cables at approximately the time when each of them was cut off on Sunday and Monday, according to data provided by the maritime monitoring group MarineTraffic collected by the Financial Times.
The Swedish Government has refused to give more details of the investigation at the moment. “This is, of course, potentially very serious,” warned Carl-Oskar Bohlin, the country’s Minister of Civil Defense, confirming “ship movements that correspond” to cable breaks.
A year ago, Finland determined that another ship of Chinese origin, called Newnew Polar Bearhad caused damage to a gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea. This ship was sailing under the Hong Kong flag and is owned by a Chinese logistics company with close ties to Russia. The owner company maintained that it was all an accident.
Russia, for its part, has targeted the cables on several occasions. The most public was when its former president, Dimitri Medvedev, now vice president of the country’s Security Council, said that nothing prevents Russia from destroying them. “If we start from the proven complicity of Western countries in the blowing up of the Nord Streams, then we have no restrictions left – not even moral – that prevent us from destroying the seabed cable communications of our enemies,” he said after the training. of the European fleet to protect them.
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This information has been updated on November 20 to include details of the Swedish authorities’ investigation into the Chinese vessel Yi Peng 3.
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