Germany says damage to Baltic underwater cables should be presumed sabotage

VILNIUS: The damaging of two undersea telecoms cables in the Baltic Sea should be presumed to be sabotage, Germany said on Tuesday, while Lithuania's armed forces boosted surveillance of its waters in response.

"No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally. I also don't want to believe in versions that these were ship anchors that accidentally caused the damage," German defence minister Boris Pistorius said before a meeting with EU colleagues in Brussels.

Two fibre-optic cables - one linking Finland and Germany, the other connecting Sweden to Lithuania - stopped working between Sunday and Monday, recalling previous security incidents in the busy waterway affected by war between Russia and Ukraine.

"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," Pistorius told journalists.

Regional Nato members were jointly assessing what happened, a spokesperson for the Lithuanian armed forces said, adding that naval forces had stepped up their patrols.

Lithuania's Prosecutor General's Office was gathering information to determine if a formal investigation should be launched, a spokesperson said.

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority said it was in contact with the other authorities to compile information. It declined to comment further.

The companies that own the two cables both said it was not yet clear what had caused the outages.

"It's not a partial damage, it's full damage," said a spokesperson for Arelion, owner and operator of the cable linking Lithuania and Sweden. Cinia, owner of the cable linking Finland and Germany, said it was not possible to say what might have caused the breach until repairs had started. The company has said repairs of this nature typically take 5-15 days.

Dutch Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans made clear he had no specific information about who was to blame, but said: "We see increasing activity of especially Russia on our seas, aimed at espionage and possibly even sabotage of our vital infrastructure."

In the most prominent Baltic sabotage case, the Nord Stream gas pipeline was destroyed in 2022, hastening Europe's switch to other energy suppliers following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

No one has taken responsibility for those blasts. While some Western officials initially blamed Moscow - an interpretation dismissed as "idiotic" by Russian President Vladimir Putin - US and German media have reported that pro-Ukrainian actors may have played a role.