Damage caused to two undersea fibre-optic communications cables in the Baltic Sea must be seen as sabotage, although it is still unclear who is responsible, Germany’s defence minister has said.
“No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally. I also don’t want to believe in versions that these were anchors that accidentally caused damage over these cables,” Boris Pistorius said before a meeting with EU defence ministers in Brussels.
“Therefore we have to state, without knowing specifically who it came from, that it is a ‘hybrid’ action. And we also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it is sabotage.”
The cables were severed on Monday, recalling other incidents in the same waterway that authorities have examined as potentially malicious, including damage to a gas pipeline and undersea cables last year and the 2022 explosions of the Nord Sea gas pipelines.
The 745-mile (1,200km) cable connecting Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working at about 2am GMT on Monday, the Finnish state-controlled cybersecurity and telecoms company Cinia said.
A 135-mile internet link between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland island went out of service at about 8am GMT on Sunday, according to Lithuania’s Telia Lietuva, part of Sweden’s Telia Company group.
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