Germany’s defense minister on Tuesday called the severing of two fiber-optic cables in the Baltic Sea an act of sabotage aimed at European countries that are supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia.
One undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany was cut on Monday and the other, which runs between Lithuania and Sweden, was severed late Sunday. The damage disrupted some data transfers but did not endanger the internet connection or security of any of the countries, authorities said.
“Nobody believes that these cables were severed by accident,” Germany’s minister of defense, Boris Pistorius, told reporters ahead of a meeting of European security officials in Brussels.
He did not believe that either of the cables could have been damaged by ships accidentally dropping their anchors. “Therefore we must state — without concrete knowledge of who was responsible — that this was a hybrid action,” he said. “And we must assume, without being certain, that this was sabotage.”
Concerns have been rising in Europe that Russia may wage a hybrid war against it in retaliation for helping Ukraine defend itself since a full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Russian ships have been reported in the Baltic and North Seas near areas where critical infrastructure lies beneath the waters.
The foreign ministries of Finland and Germany issued a joint statement late Monday expressing concern about the severed cable between their countries.
“Our European security is not only under threat from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors,” the statement said, adding that an investigation was underway. “Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies.”
Much of the world’s vital data communication infrastructure runs along ocean floors in hundreds of fiberglass cables about as thick as a garden hose. Officials are increasingly worried about how to protect them from becoming targets in conflicts around the world. Last year, investigators in Finland and Estonia said that a Chinese container ship damaged a subsea cable by dragging its anchor, but did not determine whether the damage was accidental or intentional.
The damage to the cable linking Finland’s capital, Helsinki, to Rostock in Germany happened southeast of Oland, a Swedish island, beyond regular shipping routes. It was the first time the roughly 730-mile-long cable was damaged since it went into service in 2016, authorities said.
The cable is owned by Cinia, a communications company that is majority owned by the Finnish state.
Two years ago, the Nord Stream gas pipeline, which runs near the Finnish-German fiber-optic cables, was blown up. Authorities have yet to determine who was behind its destruction, although German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man.
The situation this week did not appear to pose a threat to Finland’s security, because the country is connected to the outside world via many data links, said Samuli Bergström, director of Finland’s National Cyber Security Center.
Damage to the cable that runs between Lithuania and Sweden, which intersects the Finnish-German cable, temporarily caused a reduction in internet speeds in Lithuania, before technicians rerouted traffic, the telecommunications company Telia told the country’s public broadcaster, LRT.
Last week, the British Navy shadowed three Russian vessels as they passed through the English Channel. They included the Yantar, a Russian oceanographic research vessel that is equipped with two self-propelled deep-sea submersibles that are capable of cutting subsea cables.
U.S. officials have warned for years that a Russian cyberattack on the United States could involve severing fiber-optic cables at hard-to-reach locations to halt the communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens depend.
Finnish analysts had also voiced concerns that Russia might turn to sabotage in response to Washington’s recent decision to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles. Monday marked one year since Finland closed its border with Russia.
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