Two telecoms cables in Baltic Sea severed

German defence minister says sabotage likely

Cables between Germany and Finland, and Lithuania and Sweden both experienced sudden outages. Affected countries say that it is unlikely to be accidental.

Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius has said that the severing of an undersea communications cable between Helsinki and the German port of Rostock is likely to have been an act of sabotage.

Cinia, the Finnish state operator of the 1,200km C-Lion1 fibre optic cable, said it had been cut early on Monday morning in the Baltic Sea close to Sweden by what was almost certainly an “external force”.

Pistorius said: “No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally. Therefore we have to state, without knowing specifically who it came from, that it is a ‘hybrid’ action. And we also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it is sabotage.”

Finland and Germany have issued a joint statement of their deep concern about the possibility of hybrid warfare and stating the importance of safeguarding shared critical infrastructure.

A second smaller, 2018km cable linking Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland island also mysteriously stopped working on Sunday morning.

A spokesman for Lithuania’s Telia Lietuva confirmed that the cable had been severed. It is owned and operated by Sweden’s Arelion to carry Telia Lietuva’s internet traffic.

It isn’t the first time that cables and pipelines in the region have been damaged. In October 2023 a natural gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia was damaged, although Finnish officials later said that this was caused by a Chinese container ship dragging its anchor.

The explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany in 2022 is still under investigation.

This latest incident comes at a time of heightened tensions in the region. President Biden has authorised the use of US supplied long range missiles by Ukraine against military targets in Russia.

The UK and France are highly likely to follow suit in the coming days. Whether this late change of heart by President Biden makes a difference to the trajectory of war is being debated, and it is unlikely to be related to these incidents, but there can be no doubt it will have angered Putin.