2nd Baltic Sea Cable Cut; Germany Suspects Sabotage

The C-Lion1 cable runs alongside the multibillion-dollar Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines.

Damage to two undersea fiber-optic communication cables in the Baltic Sea—one between Lithuania and Sweden, and the other between Finland and Germany—should be regarded as sabotage, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Tuesday.

“No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally. I also don’t want to believe in versions that these were ship anchors that accidentally caused the damage,” German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said before meeting of European Union defense ministers.

“So we have to state—without knowing in concrete terms who it came from—that this is a hybrid action. And we also have to assume—without already knowing it, obviously—that this is sabotage.”

A 218-km (135-mile) internet link between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island went out of service at about 8 a.m. GMT on Sunday, according to Lithuania’s Telia Lietuva, part of Sweden’s Telia Company.

Later, Finnish state-controlled cyber security and telecoms company Cinia revealed that a separate 1,200-kilometre (745-mile) cable connecting Helsinki to the German port of Rostock has also stopped working, around 2 a.m. GMT on Monday,

Telia’s Chief Technology Officer Andrius Šemeškevičius told the Lithuanian television station LRT that no cases of sabotage have been recorded so far.

“These failures are mostly related to shipping, when a ship hooks the cable and breaks it off somewhere in a shallow place, close to the shore, by dropping anchor incorrectly,” he said on Monday.

Lithuania’s Navy said on Tuesday it had subsequently increased the surveillance of its waters.

There are about 400 subsea cables across the world, connecting islands, countries, regions, and continents. Subsea cables, which are about as thick as a garden hose, use optical fiber technology to transmit electronic communications data at the speed of light, according to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA).

The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a Nov. 18 joint statement that they were “deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea.”

By Owen Evans

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