Undersea cable cuts in the Baltic put the European Internet on alert: “Something is happening here”

On Sunday, the submarine cable connecting Lithuania to the Swedish island of Gotland suddenly stopped working. Although it is not common, sometimes the nets of fishing boats or the anchors of other vessels can damage these types of cables, through which 95% of the world’s data traffic travels. The authorities only seemed to give importance to the event early Monday morning, when the submarine link 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 has not suffered any interruption of service. The German government has no doubt about what happened. “No one believes these cables were cut by accident,” Defense Chief Boris Pistorius said on Tuesday ahead of a meeting of EU defense ministers.

“I also don’t want to believe the versions that it was anchors that accidentally damaged these cables. We must therefore affirm, without knowing precisely who is responsible, that it is a hybrid action”, continues the German: “We must assume, without being sure, that it is a 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 start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. Underwater cables are a critical part of the global internet because they are significantly faster and more reliable than satellite connectivity. to have greater transmission capacity.

This is a robust but extremely exposed infrastructure. The cable that connects Rostock to Helsinki crosses the bed of the Baltic Sea for around 1,200 kilometers. The outage occurred southeast of Öland, a Swedish island, beyond usual shipping routes, local media said, near the intersection of the damaged cable on Sunday. It is owned by Cinia, the Finnish state-owned telecommunications company.

The cables do not have specific protection. “Both the conduits and the cable itself, which is shielded to prevent cuts, are protected against physical and logical sabotage from the docking station itself until its entry into the sea. From 200 miles sailors, these are generally international waters and we can only verify outages or attempted outages,” sources in the telecommunications sector told 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’s beacons are activated, which would be difficult to achieve if your goal is to attack it. The cable, by itself, does not detect if anything is approaching it. To protect them, ten northern European countries formed a common military fleet last year.

The German and Finnish foreign ministries issued a joint statement announcing they would conduct a “thorough investigation.” “The fact that an incident of this nature immediately raises suspicion of intentional damage says a lot about the volatility of our times,” they emphasize: “Our European security is not only threatened by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also by hybrid war war of malicious actors. Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is essential to our security.

However, these types of hybrid stocks are characterized by the fact that they are 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 via the Baltic. The explosions have also been described as deliberate acts and generated international tensions due to uncertainty over who was responsible and the impact on European energy security. The only three detainees are Ukrainian citizens.

In this case, the cable cuts did not generate major connectivity problems, since these types of connections are generally reinforced with redundancies that prevent the network from failing due to the loss of a cable. Despite this, Lithuanian citizens had connection problems for a few hours, as reported by Telia, the country’s main telecommunications company.

Sweden investigates Chinese ship’s movements

Swedish authorities reported this Thursday that they had detected that a Chinese ship was sailing near the two damaged cables. The country’s prosecutor’s office points out that the Yi Peng 3, a ship registered in China which set sail from the Russian port of Ust-Luga to Egypt, passed close to the Swedish-Lithuanian and Finnish-German cables around the time where each of them was interrupted on Sunday and Monday, according to data provided by maritime monitoring group MarineTraffic collected by the Financial Times.

The Swedish government has refused to provide further details about the investigation at this time. “It is of course potentially very serious,” warned Carl-Oskar Bohlin, the country’s Minister of Civil Defense, confirming “ship movements which 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 belongs to a Chinese logistics company with close ties to Russia. The owning company claimed it was an accident.

Russia, for its part, has targeted the cables on several occasions. The most public was when its former president, Dmitry Medvedev, now vice-president of the country’s Security Council, declared that nothing stopped Russia from destroying them. “If we start from the proven complicity of Western countries in the explosion of the Nord Streams, then we no longer have any restriction – not even moral – which prevents us from destroying the cable communications of the seabed of our enemies,” he said. he declared after the training. . of the European fleet to protect them.

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This information was updated on November 20 to include details of the investigation by Swedish authorities into the Chinese vessel Yi Peng 3.