the essential
The Prime Ministers of Sweden and Denmark said this Wednesday, November 20, that they could not rule out sabotage after two Baltic Sea cables were cut, highlighting the increased risk of hybrid attacks, particularly from Russia. Like a new front in the war in Ukraine, which has exceeded 1,000 days of conflict.
The war in Ukraine… is not only taking place in Ukraine. If this war of the 21ste century obviously has a classic component with terrible battles on the front, bombings by drones or missiles which constitute a high-intensity war, it is also deployed elsewhere as a hybrid war where cyberattacks, disinformation and clandestine destabilization operations have taken place. multiplied.
We remember that on September 26, 2022, in the Baltic Sea, the Nord Stream gas pipelines were sabotaged, causing a 12% increase in gas prices in Europe the next day. The perpetrators, still unknown, could be Ukrainian commandos.
A Chinese ship suspected
This week in the Baltic Sea, two telecommunications cables broke, certainly victims of an act of sabotage. The “C-Lion1”, a 1,172-kilometer submarine cable linking Helsinki to Rostock, a Baltic Sea port in northeastern Germany, was broken on Monday, according to its operator, the Finnish technology group Cinia.
AFP
This rupture, located south of the island of Öland in Swedish waters, some 700 km from Helsinki, led to the cutting of all the fiber connections of this cable. Sweden announced the opening of an investigation into “sabotage”, with the support of Germany. On Sunday morning, another telecommunications cable, the “Arelion”, linking the Swedish island of Gotland to Lithuania, was also damaged.
According to Finnish and Swedish media, a Chinese ship, the Yi Peng 3, which left the Baltic Sea early Tuesday morning, followed by the Danish navy, after passing through a Russian port, could also have played a role in the two incidents.
BREAKING:
The Chinese vessel Yi Peng 3 has been chased, intercepted, and boarded by Danish Navy vessel Y311 Søløven after the Chinese vessel destroyed 2 undersea telecom cables linking Finland-Germany and Sweden-Lithuania.
The vessel sailed from Russia & the captain is Russian pic.twitter.com/gRJ3rxobBC
— Visegrad 24 (@visegrad24) https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1859132263746744367?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
In this context, six European countries including France accused Russia on Tuesday of carrying out hybrid attacks “unprecedented in their variety and scale” against NATO and EU countries.
The Kremlin judged this Wednesday “laughable” and “absurd” to accuse Russia, “given the lack of reaction to Ukraine's sabotage activities in the Baltic Sea”, Moscow accusing kyiv of sabotaging gas pipelines in 2022.
