Local telecommunications companies said two undersea internet cables were suddenly severed in the Baltic Sea, prompting fresh warnings about possible Russian interference in global undersea infrastructure.
The communication cable between Lithuania and Sweden was cut around 10 a.m. local time on Sunday, confirmed the spokesperson of the telecommunications company Telia Lithuania. Due to the traffic disruption, the company’s monitoring systems were able to determine that a cut had occurred and that the cause was probably physical damage to the cable itself, said Audrius Stasiulaitis, a spokesman for Telia Lithuania. “We can confirm that the interruption of Internet traffic was not caused by a malfunction of the equipment, but by physical damage to the optical cable.” Another cable connecting Finland and Germany was also interrupted, Cinia, the state-controlled Finnish company that operates the connection, said. The Lion cable – the only such direct connection between Finland and Central Europe – is nearly 1,200 kilometers long, including other key infrastructures including gas pipelines and electricity cables.
The incidents came as two of the affected countries, Sweden and Finland, updated their citizens’ guide to surviving the war. Millions of households in the Nordic countries will receive booklets with guidance on how to prepare for the effects of military conflict, communication disruptions and power outages. Both countries joined NATO in the past two years after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The severed area along the Finnish-German cable is roughly 100 kilometers from the Lithuanian-Swedish cable that was cut. It is not yet clear what exactly caused the error in the C-Lion cable – Cinia said in a statement that the problem is still being investigated. A physical examination has not yet been carried out, said the company’s CEO, Ari-Jussi Knaapila, who told a press conference on Monday that the sudden outage suggests that the cable was cut by an external force.
The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a joint statement on Monday evening that they were “deeply concerned” about the broken C-Lion cable and raised the possibility of “hybrid warfare”. “The fact that such an incident immediately raises the suspicion of intentional harm says a lot about the situation of our time. A thorough investigation is underway,” the statement said. “Our European security is threatened not only by Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine, but also by the hybrid warfare of malicious actors.” The C-Lion1 cable runs more than 1,170 kilometers from the Finnish capital Helsinki to Rostock in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Commissioned in the spring of 2016, the cable is the only undersea data cable that runs directly from Finland to Central Europe.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius suspects that the cables were deliberately damaged. “No one believes that these cables were accidentally cut,” says the German Defense Minister. The Finnish Foreign Ministry and the Berlin Ministry of Foreign Affairs are also “deeply concerned”. It must be assumed that it is sabotage, said the SPD politician in Brussels with his EU colleagues However, there is no evidence of this yet. “We take this high threat situation very, very seriously,” said Nancy Faeser (SPD) Federal Minister of the Interior. The cable was damaged in Swedish waters. “As an authority, we are not involved yet, but we have offered our help and support.
The United States recently warned that it had detected increased Russian military activity around key undersea cables. The United States believes that Russia is now more likely to carry out potential acts of sabotage on these critical pieces of infrastructure. The warning followed a joint investigation by the public broadcasters of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, which reported in April 2023 that Russia was operating a suspected fleet of spy ships in Scandinavian waters as part of a potential program to sabotage underwater cables and wind farms in the region.
The extent of the disruption caused by Cinia C-Lion’s flaw, which was discovered on Monday, is unclear. Most important data flows are usually carried over several different cables to avoid over-reliance on a single connection. A repair ship is ready to go to the site of the fault, Cinia said in a statement on Monday evening. The company does not yet know how long the repair will take, but added that for undersea cables it is usually between five and 15 days. Lithuanian state media first reported the disconnect between Lithuania and Sweden, quoting Andrius Semeskevicius, chief technology officer of Telia Lithuania, as saying the cable provides roughly a third of Lithuania’s internet capacity.
A spokesman for the Cyber Security Center of the Finnish Transport and Communications Authority, Traficom, told Yle in an emphatically calm manner. He told the broadcaster: “Disturbances happen from time to time and there can be different reasons. He cited weather conditions and shipping damage as examples. The most important thing is to ‘recognise the problems and take corrective measures.'” Another expert from Yle- nek said that the damage could even be a deliberate act, which probably came from Russia About 200 cases of undersea cable damage occur each year, the vast majority of which are related to anchors or fishing.
The cable is operated by the Swedish telecommunications company Arelion. Company spokesman Martin Sjögren confirmed the damage to the BCS east-west link and said the company was in contact with Swedish military and civil authorities regarding the incident. The cable connected Gotland in Sweden and Šventoji in Lithuania, he said. The fault was discovered on Sunday during a routine round-the-clock inspection of the company’s network, and the cable is expected to be repaired in the coming weeks, depending on weather conditions, he added.
Source: sg.hu
