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The Swedish navy said it had an “almost 100%” picture of the vessels at the sites of the suspected sabotage of undersea cables in the Baltic as Danish officials said the country’s navy had a vessel shadowing a Chinese cargo ship.
Specialist Swedish underwater search crews were at the site of the Finnish-German cable – one of two undersea fibre-optic cables that were damaged – gathering evidence for Swedish investigators on Wednesday. A cable between Sweden and Lithuania was also damaged.
Naval officials said the information gathered was classified for the Swedish police and prosecutor, but there was an “almost 100% identification” of the ships that were in the area of the two cable breaks.
Denmark had earlier said it had a naval vessel next to a Chinese cargo ship, the Yi Peng 3, anchored in the Baltic between Sweden and Denmark, where the cables were severed in a suspected malicious attack on Sunday and Monday.
The Danish Defence command said: “The Danish Defence can confirm that we are present in the area near the Chinese ship Yi Peng 3. The Danish Defence currently has no further comments.”
According to Vesselfinder tracking data, the last time the cargo ship, which is owned by Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, a company registered in Ningbo, visited a port was on 15 November in Ust-Luga in western Russia, close to the border with Estonia.
Russian maritime pilot Alexander Stechentsev, who had boarded the ship to guide it out of port, told the Guardian there was nothing unusual about the vessel. The Ust-Luga port authority employee said he took the ship to a receiving buoy located 11 miles offshore before disembarking. He described the Yi Peng 3 vessel as “a standard 225-meter bulk carrier” with a crew of Chinese nationals.
“There was absolutely nothing unusual about the ship,” he said.
A Russian maritime database confirms that he left the Yi Peng 3 vessel on 15 November afternoon.
Russia has denied any involvement in the cable incidents. On Wednesday the Kremlin said such accusations were “ridiculous” and that it was absurd to accuse Russia without evidence.
Sweden and Finland are jointly investigating the incidents as potential sabotage, with Sweden leading the investigation.
The investigators in Sweden were analysing any potential role by the Chinese ship, according to the Financial Times, but the Swedish government did not comment on this. A government source told the Guardian that information on the incident was “moving very quickly”.
Last year, the anchor of another Chinese vessel, the container ship Newnew Polar Bear – was found to have damaged a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia. Authorities have not said whether they believed the incident to be intentional or accidental.
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Overnight, the Swedish navy used unmanned, remote-controlled submarines to investigate the southern site of the two cables, but warned it would take “several days” due to the challenges of forecast bad weather and the potential for poor visibility.
Jimmie Adamsson, a Swedish navy spokesperson, said the navy had been asked to support the Swedish prosecutor and police with their investigations and ships were sent out immediately. They have been asked to gather evidence at the sites of the two breaks – one 100-150 metres deep (the Sweden-Lithuania cable) and the other 20-40 metres deep (the Finland-Germany cable). They have also been asked to put together a picture of what vessels were there, and at what time.
The navy’s crew, which is trained to search underwater, has performed similar tasks twice before during the investigation into the suspected sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022.
Adamsson said: “Yesterday [Tuesday], a couple of navy ships left the Swedish ports and went to the most southerly point of the two. They have been working throughout the night until the morning. There was a bit of rough weather.”
At any given time, there are about 4,000 large vessels in the Baltic passing over a web of underwater cables transporting data, electricity and gas across Europe.
The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has said that she was “not surprised” by the potential for sabotage. “If the immediate assessment is that it is sabotage and it comes from outside, then it is obviously serious. I am not surprised that it can happen,” she said.
Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, has already said he assumed the act was sabotage. “No one believes that the cables were accidentally damaged,” he said.
Sweden’s civil defence minister, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, quickly made the link between the movement of ships and the severed cables. “There are ship movements that correspond to this crime on maritime surveillance,” he said.
The Finnish security intelligence service (Supo) said it was “too early to assess the cause of the cable damage” but it was supporting other authorities with their expertise. It said about 200 submarine cable breakages happened every year globally, the most common cause being human activities such as fishing or anchoring.
