Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Sunday that his country was “not at war” but was not going through a period of peace either, citing hybrid attacks and a proxy war being waged on its soil.
“Sweden is not at war, but there is no peace either. True peace is freedom, and the absence of serious conflicts between countries,” he said at the annual Folk och Defense Forum in Salen, central Sweden.
“We and our neighbors are subject to hybrid attacks that do not come from missiles or soldiers but from computers, money, disinformation and threats of sabotage,” he continued. “This security situation and the fact that strange things continue to happen in the Baltic lead us to believe that hostile intentions cannot be ignored,” the official also said.
Several electricity and telecommunications cables have been damaged in the Baltic in recent months. These damages, targeting energy and communication infrastructures, are part, according to experts and political leaders, in the context of a “hybrid war” led by Moscow against Western countries, in this vast maritime area bordered by several members of NATO and by Russia.
The Eagle S, flying the flag of the Cook Islands, an oil tanker suspected of belonging to the Russian “ghost fleet” and of having damaged an electric cable and four telecommunications cables between Finland and Estonia on December 25, has just been be prohibited from navigation.
Sweden and Finland, which recently joined NATO, are particularly attentive to recurring incidents in the Baltic Sea, where tension has risen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A bulk carrier flying the Chinese flag, the Yi Peng 3, is also in the sights of Swedish justice in the investigation into the rupture on November 17 and 18 of two telecommunications cables in Swedish waters.
The Swedish Prime Minister did not point the finger at any country’s responsibility for the damaged cables during his speech. But speaking more generally about hybrid attacks in the region, he said: “the Russian threat is likely to be a long-term one. Just like our defense must do.
The Swedish government “takes this situation seriously”, believing that the country was living “in an era of proxy war”. “Iran is using organized criminal gangs to carry out serious proxy attacks on us,” he also said. In late May, the Swedish intelligence agency Säpo accused Iran of recruiting members of Swedish criminal gangs to carry out “acts of violence” against Israeli and other interests in Sweden, which Iran denied.
