Legal Insurrection readers may recall our report on the possible sabotage of critical communication cables in the Baltic Sea.
At the end of 2024, Sweden requested help investigating the Yi Peng 3, a Chinese-flagged bulk carrier suspected of being involved in the incident. The ship may have dragged its anchor over cables connecting Sweden to Lithuania and Finland to Germany.
Then, on Christmas Day 2024, the Estlink 2 undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia experienced an unexpected outage, reducing the cross-border power transmission capacity between the two countries substantially.
Finnish police investigated whether a Russian ship was involved, and NATO increased naval patrols in the Baltic.
Now an undersea fiber optic cable connecting Latvia and Sweden was damaged, likely due to “external factors”. The cable, owned by Latvia’s state radio and television center (LVRTC), links the Latvian town of Ventspils with Sweden’s Gotland island.
An undersea fiber optic cable between Latvia and Sweden was damaged on Sunday, likely as a result of external influence, Latvia said, triggering an investigation by local and NATO maritime forces in the Baltic Sea.“We have determined that there is most likely external damage and that it is significant,” Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina told reporters following an extraordinary government meeting.Latvia is coordinating with NATO and the countries of the Baltic Sea region to clarify the circumstances, she said separately in a post on X.Latvia’s navy earlier on Sunday said it had dispatched a patrol boat to inspect a ship and that two other vessels were also subject to investigation.
And by “external factors,” what is meant is that sabotage is suspected.
Swedish prosecutors quickly announced that they had opened a preliminary investigation into suspected aggravated “sabotage” and ordered the detention of a vessel in the Baltic Sea. The ship had recently left from a Russian port.
“Several authorities, including the National Police Operations Department, the Coast Guard and the Armed Forces, are involved in the investigation,” said Mats Ljungqvist, senior prosecutor at the National Security Unit, according to a press release.The Swedish Coast Guard confirmed to the newspaper Expressen that they were on site near the vessel which the paper identified as the Malta-flagged Vezhen, at anchor near the port of Karlskrona.“We are directly on site with the seized ship and are taking measures as decided by the prosecutor,” said Mattias Lindholm, spokesperson for the Coast Guard.According to data from Vesselfinder, the vessel departed from the Russian port of Ust-Luga several days earlier and was navigating between Gotland and Latvia at the time the damage was suspected of having occurred.
By way of an update, the Yi Peng 3, the Chinese bulk carrier investigated for the December incident, departed from the Kattegat area in late 2024, after being anchored there for several weeks90. The ship then sailed to Port Said in Egypt, traveling independently. This departure came after a month-long standoff during the Chinese blocked a full investigation of the craft.
Today’s incident is not an auspicious start to NATO’s “Baltic Sentry” naval protection program, which officially began in early January. The venture includes frigates, maritime patrol aircraft and a fleet of naval drones to provide “enhanced surveillance and deterrence”.
“Across the alliance, we have seen elements of a campaign to destabilize our societies through cyberattacks, assassination attempts and sabotage, including possible sabotage of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea,” Rutte told reporters after a meeting in Helsinki with the leaders of Allied Baltic nations.Announcing the new operation, Rutte noted that more than 95% of internet traffic is secured via undersea cables, and 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) of cables guarantee an estimated $10 trillion worth of financial transactions every day.
Clearly, the cable-cutting chaos agents have yet to be deterred. Hopefully, that will turn-around soon before something substantial and important has an anchor dragged across it.
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