On the morning of Sunday, Nov. 17, an undersea cable connecting Sweden and Lithuania suddenly stopped working. Less than 24 hours later, the only cable connecting Finland and central Europe had been cut, too. Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said on Nov. 19 that the incidents were “probably sabotage.”
Indeed, this was not the first case of suspected sabotage in the Baltic Sea, with the evidence so far pointing to a Chinese merchant vessel with a Russian captain. But while Western governments may be able to identify culprits, avenging the acts is much harder than it seems.
“The cable was cut on Sunday morning, at around 10. The systems immediately reported that we had lost the connection. Further investigation and clarification took place, and it turned out that it was damaged,” Andrius Semeskevicius, the chief technology officer at Telia Lietuva (the Lithuanian arm of the Swedish telecoms giant Telia), told Lithuanian public television on Monday evening.
By then, it was clear that the damage to the communications cable, which connects Lithuania with the strategically vital Swedish Baltic Sea island of Gotland, wasn’t the result of natural ocean movements or even sloppy seafarers or fishers. By the time that Semeskevicius spoke with Lithuanian television, another undersea cable in the Baltic Sea had also been mauled.
The second cable is even more important than the Swedish-Lithuanian one. The C-Lion1, which connects Finland with Germany via the southern tip of Sweden’s Baltic Sea island of Oland, is the only cable providing this connection. (C-Lion1 is owned by the Finnish state-owned firm Cinia Oy.)
At one point, the two cables intersect. And in the early hours of Nov. 18, someone had arrived at the intersection point with apparent intent to harm.
“Here we can see that the cables cross in an area of only 10 square meters—they intersect,” Semeskevicius told Lithuanian television. “Since both are damaged, it is clear that this was not an accidental dropping of one of the ship’s anchors, but something more serious could be going on.”
He’s right. It’s extremely unlikely that the two cables were cut by accident. And almost exactly one year ago, two Baltic Sea undersea cables and one pipeline were damaged during the course of one night. Investigators from Sweden, Finland, and Estonia—in whose exclusive economic zones the damage occurred—soon established that the likely culprit was the Chinese ship called the Newnew Polar Bear, which had dragged its anchor across all three. The container ship is owned in China, flagged in Hong Kong, and had a pioneering journey from Russia to China along the Arctic Northern Sea Route under its belt.
But by the time the investigators decided that they wanted to speak with its crew, it had already sailed out of the Baltic Sea, northward via the Norwegian coast, and onward to the Russian Arctic. Since then, the Chinese government has failed to respond to requests for cooperation in the investigation.
This time too, the culprit appears to be a Chinese merchant vessel. Within hours after the C-Lion1 incident, investigators and hobby sleuths had identified the likely perpetrator: the Chinese-flagged bulk carrier Yi Peng 3. On Nov. 12, the ship had arrived in Russia’s Baltic Sea port of Ust-Luga; three days later, it left the port. Two days later the first cable was cut, and then the second.
On the morning of Nov. 19, the Yi Peng 3 was sailing away from the Baltic Sea toward the Atlantic. By the afternoon, it was approaching the Danish Straits—but this time, NATO members’ naval forces were not going to let a suspicious Chinese ship get away. By early evening, as it approached Denmark’s Great Belt strait, it was clear that it was being followed by the Royal Danish Navy, which also has coast guard duties. Ships from the Swedish Navy and Coast Guard were also nearby, on the Swedish side.
Later that evening, the Yi Peng 3 appeared to be leaving Danish waters and sailing north toward Sweden and Norway and onward to the Atlantic Ocean. But then it stopped. At noon today, the bulk carrier was still in the same spot, squarely between the Danish and Swedish coasts in the southern part of the Kattegat Strait.
To get to the Atlantic, the ship still needs to pass through the rest of the Kattegat. At the time of writing, it remains unclear why it had stopped. Open-source intelligence sleuths report that Danish officials have detained it, though the Danish Armed Forces have said only that they’re present in the area near the ship. Will Danish and Swedish investigators (and German, Finnish, and Lithuanian ones) try to forcibly board the ship?
But if Western navy and coast guard ships manage to keep the Yi Peng 3 in the Kattegat, what would they do? They could try to board the ship, yes, but what exactly would they do then?
Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, signatories agree to protect undersea installations in their waters. But the treaty—known as the “constitution of the oceans”—doesn’t specify what coastal states should do if aggressive-minded rival countries use nonmilitary vessels to sabotage infrastructure in their waters.
Indeed, the brilliant minds that negotiated the convention may not have considered the possibility of signatories using criminal activity to score geopolitical points against other countries. Investigators are pursuing a criminal case against the Yi Peng 3’s crew, but the case is about much more than criminal actions by a single ship’s crew. The Chinese government, meanwhile, has denied that anything is amiss, telling the NTB news agency that Chinese vessels obey maritime law.
This is the dilemma for the Baltic Sea countries (NATO’s dominance there notwithstanding) and other Western nations: Russia, China, and other countries can use private outfits, criminals, and sundry other collaborators to harm them, and it may never be possible to establish a link between the perpetrators and the governments on whose behalf harmful acts were committed.
Even if the Danish Navy boards the vessel, we’ll likely never know what conversations the Yi Peng 3’s owner, or its shipmaster, have had with the governments of Russia or China. We’ll also never know what conversations took place before a Chinese cargo vessel and a Chinese fishing boat cut the two undersea cables that connect Taiwan’s Matsu Islands with Taiwan proper in February last year.
We simply know that even though the cables are easily found on navigational charts and thus should have been easy to avoid, the two vessels cut them, thus disconnecting the Matsu Island residents from the rest of the world. (And no, a Chinese merchant vessel would not sabotage undersea infrastructure on any government’s behalf without permission from Beijing.)
As for the Yi Peng 3, we know only that it left Ust-Luga bound for Egypt’s Port Said and likely cut two crucial cables so badly that they stopped working. The ship’s crew did so even though the cables’ locations are precisely mapped, and even though a normal merchant crew could have been expected to be extra careful in light of the damage caused by the Newnew Polar Bear last year, if that damage was indeed an accident.
We also know that Russian federal port records show the Yi Peng 3 being captained by a Russian. Given that Russia is one of the world’s top five sources of seafarers, especially officers, a Russian shipmaster is not unusual. But having a Russian shipmaster rather than, say, an Indian or Romanian, certainly makes sabotage in the Baltic Sea a bit more straightforward.
After the suspected sabotage, the Yi Peng 3 sailed off toward the Atlantic even though the NATO ships were in pursuit.
“It’s a very clear sign that something is going on. Nobody believes that these cables were cut by mistake, and I’m not going to believe the theory that it was anchors that were accidentally dragged across these cables,” Pistorius, the German defense minister, said on Nov. 19, adding: “We have to assume, without knowing precisely from whom it stems, that this an act of hybrid aggression, and we have to assume that it’s a case of sabotage.”
Around the same time, the foreign ministers of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and Poland made similar observations: “Moscow’s escalating hybrid activities against NATO and EU countries are also unprecedented in their variety and scale, creating significant security risks,” they said in a statement.
Pistorius is right. Considering the evidence, concluding that the incidents were an act of sabotage is common sense. That raises the question of what to do about it. After the Newnew Polar Bear damaged the cables and the pipeline, NATO similarly monitored its journey out of the Baltic Sea, along the Norwegian coast, and into Arctic waters. What would the militaries involved have done if it had stopped and allowed them to board?
If they had failed to board the Newnew Polar Bear, the public in Western countries would have complained of NATO cowardice. But if they had boarded, China and Russia would have retaliated, despite claiming that they have no connection with the cargo ship. The same acute dilemma now faces the Danish authorities watching the Yi Peng 3.
For the moment, NATO and its member states will continue to monitor threats to undersea infrastructure. These days, the military alliance even has a Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network. Owners and operators of cables, pipelines, and other sea-based infrastructure are anxiously monitoring, too.
But the next time that saboteurs arrive—and they will—NATO’s navies will face the same painful question. The myriad pipelines, and especially communications cables, were products of our harmonious globalized age. Now they’re the new front line.
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