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Two undersea Internet cables in the Baltic Sea were suddenly cut, according to local telecommunications companies, amid fresh warnings about possible Russian interference in global underwater infrastructure.
The communication cable between Lithuania and Sweden was cut on Sunday morning local time, a spokesman for the telecommunications company Telia Lithuania confirmed.
The company’s monitoring systems were able to tell that the outage was due to traffic disruption, and that the cause was likely physical damage to the cable itself, Telia Litva spokesman Audrius Stasiulaitis said.
“We can confirm that the interruption of Internet traffic was not caused by equipment failure, but by physical damage to the fiber optic cable.”
Another cable connecting Finland and Germany was also cut, according to Cinia, the state-controlled Finnish company that operates the link. The C-Lion cable – the only direct connection of its kind between Finland and Central Europe – stretches for almost 1,200 km, along with other key pieces of infrastructure, including gas pipelines and energy cables.
The severed area along the Finnish-German cable is roughly 100 km from the severed Lithuanian-Swedish cable, CNN’s analysis of undersea routes shows.
It’s unclear exactly what caused the fault in the C-Lion cable – Cinia said in a statement that it was still investigating the issue. A physical examination has not yet been carried out, Reuters reported, citing company CEO Ari-Jussi Knaapila, who told a press conference on Monday that the sudden break implied the cable had been cut by an outside force.
The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a joint statement on Monday that they were “deeply concerned” about the cut C-Lion cable and raised the possibility of “hybrid warfare”.
“The fact that such an incident immediately arouses suspicion of intentional damage speaks volumes about the instability of our times. A thorough investigation is underway,” the statement said.
“Our European security is threatened not only by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also by hybrid warfare by malicious actors.”
Fear of submarine sabotage
The incidents come just weeks after the US warned it had detected increased Russian military activity around key undersea cables.
Two US officials told CNN in September that the US believes Russia is now more likely to carry out potential sabotage operations against these critical pieces of infrastructure.
The warning followed a joint investigation by public broadcasters Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, which reported in April 2023 that Russia had a fleet of suspected spy ships operating in Nordic waters as part of a program to potentially sabotage submarine cables and wind farms in the region.
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