An undersea telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Germany across the Baltic Sea was severed, raising suspicions of intentional damage, the NATO member states said.
On Monday, Finnish company Cinia, which constructs fiber optic networks and provides telecommunications services, said a “fault” has been detected in the C-Lion1 submarine cable. “Due to the fault, the services provided over the C-Lion1 are down,” it announced.
This was the first time the cable has broken, said Ari-Jussi Knaapila, CEO of Cinia. The cable did not break without an external impact, a company spokesperson explained, adding that no seismic events—such as earthquakes—could have been responsible for this.
“The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times. A thorough investigation is underway,” Finland and Germany said in a joint statement, which were deeply concerned about the incident.
“Our European security is not only under threat from Russia‘s war of aggression against Ukraine but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors,” they added. “Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies.”
This came after Nikolai Patrushev, former secretary of Russia’s Security Council and an ally of President Vladimir Putin, accused the United States and the United Kingdom of intending to sabotage underwater internet cables “to promote their economic interests.”
In an interview published last week, he also claimed that both the U.S. and the U.K. were behind the September 2022 attacks on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, which run under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany to supply Russian natural gas.
The 728-mile-long C-Lion1 lands at Hanko and Helsinki in southern Finland, as well as Rostock in northern Germany. It was launched in 2016 and connects Central European telecommunications networks to Finland and other Nordic states, according to Cinia.
According to Cinia, the severed part of the cable is located in waters southeast of the Swedish island of Öland, which is approximately halfway along the cable. The area of the incident is within Sweden’s exclusive economic zone and outside the busiest shipping area.
The Finnish Security and Intelligence Service told the country’s public service broadcaster Yle that it was “too early” to assess the cause of the incident, noting that human activity, including fishing and anchoring, is the most common cause of undersea cable breakage.
Following the incident, Cinia has begun the repair work by preparing a repair vessel to the site. However, the company admitted that it was not immediately clear how long the work would take, saying typically it needs five to 15 days to fix a damaged submarine cable.
Katja Bego, a senior research fellow at U.K.-based Chatham House’s International Security program, said on social media platform Bluesky that cable faults were not rare in busy shipping areas like the Baltic Sea. “The overwhelming majority [of faults] are accidental,” Bego said.
“The usual Kremlin playbook suggests we interpret this as a warning that this is something that Russia plans to do herself,” she said, referring to Patrushev’s comment.
Newsweek has reached out to the Kremlin and the Russian Foreign Ministry for comment via email.
Meanwhile, The Guardian reported on Saturday that Russian spy ship Yantar has been escorted out of the Irish Sea, which lies between the islands of Ireland and Great Britain, after it transited the Irish economic waters containing submarine pipelines and cables.
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