Germany blames ‘sabotage’ as two undersea fiber cables cut in the Baltic Sea

The German government has blamed an act of sabotage for the cutting of two important undersea fiber optic cables, one connecting connecting Finland and Germany, and the other linking Sweden and Lithuania, on Sunday and Monday.

The first cable break happened at around 8 a.m. GMT (3 a.m. EST) on Sunday in the 135-mile undersea link between the Swedish island of Gotland and Lithuania, Lithuanian operator Telia Lietuva said. Hours later, at 2 a.m. GMT on Monday (9 p.m. EST on Sunday), Finnish telecoms company that seemed to hint at Russia as being responsible.

“The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times,” it began. “Our European security is not only under threat from Russia‘s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors. Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies.”

Implausible deniability

In fact, the cause of the damage remains under investigation, but coincidence can’t be ruled out, something a perpetrator would of course have built into its calculations. 

“Fishing vessels accidentally damage cables with anchors,” a spokesperson for the company at the Swedish end of the connection with Lithuania, Arelion, told the BBC. “The timing is odd of course, but we haven’t been able to examine it so we don’t know what caused it,” he said.

For pessimists, it will look like another example of hybrid warfare — conducting aggressive acts while hiding behind plausible deniability and the vacuum often created around disputed events. Russia, not coincidentally, has practiced this doctrine stretching back to the Cold War. The intention is not to argue against the truth so much as confuse where certainty might lie.

In Russia’s case, this increasingly creates a sense of implausible deniability, where the country is blamed for everything, including events it might not be responsible for.

The Baltic Sea has recently been the location of a series of unusual incidents, none of which have ever definitively been blamed on anyone. This includes the blowing up of the Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in September 2022, and by Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) senior research fellow, Dr Sidharth Kaushal, noted Russia’s extensive capabilities in terms of undersea sabotage. While it’s unlikely these could be used in the Baltic without being detected, their existence underlined how the target list had expanded in recent times.

“The different components of Russia’s overall maritime sabotage capability pose different challenges to the critical infrastructure of European countries, which encompasses undersea cables, gas pipelines and windfarms, among other things,” wrote Kaushal.