Two underwater cables carrying internet data at the bottom of the Baltic Sea have been damaged, European telecommunications companies said, drawing European governments attention to a possible Russian “hybrid war” targeting global communications infrastructure.
The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a joint statement on Monday that a cable connecting the two countries had been cut and the incidents had raised suspicions of possible sabotage.
“A thorough investigation is underway. Our European security is not only threatened by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukrainebut also hybrid warfare carried out by malicious actors,” the ministers said, without attributing possible sabotage to any particular entity.
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Finnish company Cinia confirmed on Monday that its submarine cable between Finland and Germany had been damaged. The cable is approximately 730 miles long and connects Central Europe’s telecommunications networks to Finland and other Nordic countries.
“The details of the outage are not yet known and are currently under investigation,” the company said in a statement on its website.
Swedish company Arelion confirmed to CBS News on Tuesday that one of its cables was also damaged.
“We can confirm that one of our submarine fiber cables – the one between Gotland, Sweden, and Šventoji, Lithuania – is damaged. The problem was detected on November 17 and we currently do not know the cause because we were unable to “Examine the cable,” Arelion spokesperson Martin Sjögren told CBS News.
“Arelion is in contact with the Swedish authorities and the Swedish Armed Forces regarding the incident. The cable will be repaired over the coming weeks depending on weather conditions,” it said.
Audrius Stasiulaitis, a spokesman for Swedish multinational telecommunications company Telia, which uses and operates the Arelion cable, said the company believed the cable had been physically damaged.
“We can only speculate on what happened, but from what we know it is not affected by equipment failure and we presume it is physical damage,” he said. he told CBS News by telephone on Tuesday.
The damage to the cables comes after reports last year that Russia could target key infrastructure linking the Nordic countries.
A joint investigation in April 2023 by the public broadcasters of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland found that Moscow operated a fleet of suspected intelligence vessels in Nordic waters as part of a Kremlin campaign potentially aimed at targeting submarine cables and wind farms.
There was attacks on European infrastructure since Russia launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine 1,000 days ago.
In September 2022, the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, both intended to transport natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, were damaged by explosions.
Ukraine and Russia have denied any involvement in the explosions. In August, German media reported that prosecutors had issued a arrest warrant against Ukrainian man because of the attacks on the pipeline.
Both Sweden and Finland joined the NATO military alliance Over the past two years, as the war in Ukraine has fueled concerns about Russia’s possible intentions, and just this week, both countries updated their war preparedness guidelines and released online pamphlets allowing citizens to prepare for the possibility of war or other crisis.
