A Swedish government minister said Tuesday that the country was investigating a damaged telecommunications undersea cable linking Lithuania and Sweden, a day after the announcement that a cable linking Finland and Germany was cut in what Berlin considers “sabotage”.
Minister for Civil Defence Carl-Oskar Bohlin told AFP in a written statement that it was “crucial to clarify why we currently have two cables in the Baltic Sea that are not working”.
Bohlin added that “relevant Swedish authorities are investigating the events”.
The “Arelion” submarine cable between the Swedish island of Gotland and Lithuania has been damaged since Sunday morning, a spokesman for the Lithuanian branch of the operator Telia said Tuesday.
Internet traffic has been redirected to other international links, Audrius Stasiulaitis said.
“We can confirm that the interruption to internet traffic was not caused by an equipment fault but by material damage to the fibre optic cable,” he said.
He added that customers were at this time not being affected by the outage.
On Monday, Finnish operator Cinia reported that a cable connecting Helsinki and the German port of Rostock had been cut for unknown reasons.
Germany and Finland subsequently said they had launched a probe into the damage, warning of the threat of “hybrid warfare”.
German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius also said Tuesday that the severing of cables between Finland and Germany and from Sweden to Lithuania was a “clear sign that something is going on”.
“Nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed,” Pistorius said on the sidelines of a meeting of EU ministers in Brussels.
“We have to say, without knowing exactly who it came from, that this is a hybrid action. We also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it was sabotage,” he said.