Finnish Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen said Tuesday that NATO and the European Union must raise their game to protect themselves from hybrid threats and defend undersea cables from attack.
“NATO and [the] EU have to do a lot more to protect this critical infrastructure,” Häkkänen told POLITICO following the EU Foreign Affairs Council (defense format) in Brussels, adding that the topic had been discussed during the meeting.
Häkkänen’s remarks follow a Monday announcement by Finnish network company Cinia that it is investigating damage to an undersea internet cable connecting Santahamina, near Helsinki, to Rostock, Germany. The incident sparked political concern in both Berlin and Helsinki.
Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius on Tuesday referred to the damage as “sabotage.”
“We know that Russia has [the] capability and willingness to do sabotage in Europe,” Häkkänen told POLITICO.
“And of course, we are investigating [these] kind of damages also with that kind of point of view, that is there [is] sabotage. Because it’s really unlikely that [it] is some kind of a natural accident.”
Foreign ministers from Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom warned in a joint declaration on Tuesday of “Moscow’s escalating hybrid activities” against NATO and EU nations, calling them unprecedented in scale and potential impact.
However, Swedish outlet SVT on Tuesday evening reported the existence of satellite images showing that a Chinese ship had been in the vicinity when the cables were damaged.
According to SVT, Danish naval vessels tracked the Chinese boat in the Baltic Sea.
This marks the second time in a year that Baltic Sea infrastructure — which includes communications cables and energy pipelines such as Nord Stream — has been damaged, raising concerns over security and sabotage.
Another telecom cable in the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island was damaged Sunday morning, telecom company Telia Lietuva, a branch of Sweden’s Telia, reported Monday.
In October last year, the Balticconnector gas pipeline and a telecom cable connecting Finland and Estonia were damaged. A telecom cable linking Estonia to Sweden was also damaged on the same night, along with one of Russia’s telecos cables in the Gulf of Finland. Investigations have since focused on a Chinese vessel, the Newnew Polar Bear, which was in the area during one of the incidents.
Häkkänen described such attacks on critical infrastructure in international waters as “kind of a new thing,” and said they are difficult to prevent.
“These undersea cables are quite likely the most difficult parts of our societies to protect when they are under international waters, at the seabed. So that’s why this is so difficult for Western countries,” he said.
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