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20-11-2024
BERLIN/ Germany and Finland say they are “deeply concerned” after an undersea cable linking the countries was severed.
The rupture of the 1,170km (730-mile) telecommunications cable which is being investigated comes at a time of heightened tension with Russia.
The two countries’ foreign ministers said in a joint statement: “Our European security is not only under threat from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors.”
Damage to pipelines in the Baltic Sea has raised fears of sabotage in recent years.
In October 2023 a natural gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia was severely damaged. Finnish officials later said the incident had been caused by a Chinese container ship dragging its anchor.
And German prosecutors are still investigating the explosion of Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany in 2022.
There have been conspiracy theories around that attack, with unconfirmed rumors that either the Ukrainian, Russian or US government was behind it.
The latest incident involves a C-Lion1 fibrotic cable linking the Finnish capital, Helsinki and the German city of Rostock.
Finnish network operator Cinia said all fiber connections in it had been cut.
“These kinds of breaks don’t happen in these waters without an outside impact,” a Cinia spokesperson told local media.
Samuli Bergstrom, a Finnish government cybersecurity expert, said the failure had not affected internet traffic between the two countries as other cable routes were available.
German state prosecutors trying to solve the mystery of who blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea in 2022 have issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diving instructor.
The suspect has been named as Volodymyr Z by German media, who have treated the sabotage like a sensational true crime drama.
Ines Peterson, a spokeswoman for Germany’s prosecutor general, declined to confirm the arrest warrant, telling media that her office never commented so as not to jeopardize the investigation by giving the suspect a chance to escape but the Polish prosecutor general’s spokeswoman, Anna Adamiak, in Warsaw told media that a European Arrest Warrant had indeed been passed to them by German prosecutors when Polish officers went to Volodymyr Z’s home in early July, he had already left the country for Ukraine, she said.
He had until then been living in a quiet residential area of Pruszkow, a town near Warsaw, German media say.
According to an investigation by three German media outlets, including public broadcaster ARD, Volodymyr Z was part of a team of experienced Ukrainian divers who in September 2022 hired a German yacht, sailed out into the Baltic Sea and planted the explosives, blowing up three of the four Nord Stream pipelines.
A Ukrainian man and a Ukrainian woman are also suspected of involvement.
If the latest media reports are true, that a group of Ukrainian divers blew up the pipelines, it still doesn’t answer the broader question of who ordered the attack.
There is so far no public evidence linking it to the Ukrainian or Russian state or for that matter any other country or individual group. For years there have been conspiracy theories around the attack, with unconfirmed rumors that governments in Kyiv, Moscow or Washington were behind the attack.
There has also been speculation that Ukrainian or Russian military groups, acting without the knowledge of the Ukrainian government, might have been responsible. (Int’l News Desk)
