The foreign ministers of Germany And FinlandAnnalena Baerbock and Elina Valtonen, respectively, expressed this Monday the “deep concern” of their countries after learning of the break in submarine cable telecommunications at sea Baltic which linked the two nations.
“We are deeply concerned about the cutting of the submarine cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea,” they said in a joint statement issued by the two ministers.
“The fact that an incident of this type immediately raises suspicion of intentional damage says a lot about the volatility of our times,” Baerbock and Valtonen said of an event that An investigation continued to clarify what happened, something that is used in Berlin and Helsinki to remember the threats weighing on European countries.
“Our European security is not only threatened by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukrainebut also for the malicious actor hybrid warfare“, underlined the ministers in their press release.
“Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital for our security and the resilience of our societies,” the ministers said.
The Finnish company Cinia Oyinvestigation into the causes of what happened with the underwater telecommunications cable between Finland and Germany, which caused the interruption of the data flow between the two countries, as reported by the company this Monday.
The sudden interruption means that the cable was completely cut by an external forcealthough a physical inspection has not yet been carried out, Cinia CEO Ari-Jussi Knaapila said at a press conference.
The damage occurred near the southern tip of the island of Öland in Sweden and could normally take between five and 15 days to repair, it added.
This is the C-Lion1 High Capacity Fiber Optic Cablewhich connects Helsinki and the German city of Rostock (northern Germany) across the bottom of the Baltic Sea and has a length of 1,173 kilometers.
Swedish public radio SVT reported that the authorities They were also investigating damage to a communications cable linking Lithuania and Sweden.near the one that was cut.
“It is absolutely necessary to clarify why we currently have two non-working cables in the Baltic Sea,” Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told SVT.