New Baltic Sea mystery as probe begins into two damaged cables

The Finnish network company Cinia said Monday it is investigating a broken undersea internet cable connecting Finland to Germany — in a submarine incident that also sparked political alarm in Berlin and Helsinki.
“We are deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea. The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times,” the foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a joint statement.
“A thorough investigation is underway,” they added. “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.”
A repair ship was dispatched to investigate the situation and repair the broken cable earlier Monday.
“As a result of the failure, communications on the C-Lion1 submarine cable are cut off. The cause of the fault is not yet known and is currently being investigated,” said a statement by Cinia, the Finnish state-owned company that built the cable.At a press conference Monday, Cinia’s CEO Ari-Jussi Knaapila and Director of Communications Henri Kronlund did not exclude sabotage.
Knaapila said that “some other external force has contributed to the breaking of the cable,” adding that the damage was not caused by underwater seismic activity such as a landslide.
The cable is 1,173 kilometers long and runs between Santahamina in Helsinki and Rostock in Germany, and represents the only data communications cable that runs from the Nordic country directly to Central Europe.
It follows a similar route to the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream gas pipelines, which exploded in September 2022 in an apparent act of sabotage.
Another telecommunications cable in the Baltic Sea running between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland island was damaged Sunday morning, the Swedish telecoms company Telia Lietuva reported Monday.
“The cable was cut on Sunday morning, at around 10:00. 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 Šemeškevičius, chief technology officer, told Lithuanian media LRT TV on Monday evening.
According to Šemeškevičius, the case raises suspicion as the Lithuania-Sweden and Germany-Finland cables intersect.
“Here we can see that the cables cross in an area of only 10 square meters, they intersect […] 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 said.
Last year, Finnish authorities investigated a Chinese ship named NewNew Polar Bear after it was suspected of deliberately damaging submarine cables in the Baltic Sea.
According to Samuli Bergström, a director of Finland’s National Cyber Security Center, however, “it is certainly possible” the cable broke on its own.
“Cables at the bottom of the sea are exposed to all kinds of weather phenomena and shipping. They undergo various maintenance procedures continuously,” Bergström told Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat on Monday.
The incident also comes two days after Russian spy ship was escorted away from an area with critical cables in Irish Sea.
This article has been updated.
Hans von der Burchard contributed to this report.