STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -A Baltic Sea telecom cable connecting Sweden with Estonia was damaged at roughly the same time as a Finnish-Estonian pipeline and cable were earlier this month, but remains operational, Sweden’s civil defence minister said on Tuesday.
The damage to the cable was sustained outside the territorial waters and exclusive economic zone of Sweden, Swedish Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told a news conference, and the cable had continued to function since then.
“We can’t say at the moment what caused this damage,” he said. “But what we can say is that this damage has happened at a similar time and in physical proximity … to the damage that was previously reported to a gas pipeline between Estonia and Finland and a telecommunications cable between Estonia and Finland.”
The head of Sweden’s navy said policing surface and undersea traffic in the Baltic was a challenge.
“The situation at sea is very intense,” Rear Admiral Ewa Ann-Sofi Skoog Haslum said. “There is a lot of traffic on the surface and everything that happens under the surface is ‘deniable.’ The challenge for us is to monitor this volume of water.”
Europe and NATO have become increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure around and under the Baltic Sea.
Finland said on Oct. 8 that a subsea gas pipeline and a telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia had been damaged in what may have been a deliberate act.
Finnish authorities said last week that “external marks” had been found on the seabed beside the damaged pipeline and that they were reviewing vessel traffic in the area at the time of the rupture.
That, in turn, followed explosions in September 2022 that ruptured the Nord Stream pipelines under the Baltic Sea and cut Europe’s supply of Russian gas.
At a press conference on Monday, Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said there was a “spaghetti” of critical infrastructure on the bottom of the Baltic Sea and announced that Sweden and its partners in the Joint Expeditionary Force – a 10-nation military alliance – would look at ways to improve protection of crucial pipes and cables.
(Reporting by Niklas Pollard and Simon Johnson, editing by Nerijus Adomaitis and Bill Berkrot)
