Germany blames 'sabotage' as two undersea fiber cables cut in the Baltic Sea

If someone was trying to send a message, there can be little doubt that it has been received: undersea cables are incredibly vulnerable, and can be cut at any time.

While the cables are expected to be repaired within a matter of days, and alternative connections exist in the Baltic Sea, attention has already turned to who was behind the apparent attack. On that score, the foreign ministers of Germany and Finland, Annalena Baerbock and Elina Valtonen, issued a joint statement that seemed to hint at Russia as being responsible.

“The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times,” it began. “Our European security is not only under threat from Russia‘s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors. Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies.”

Implausible deniability

In fact, the cause of the damage remains under investigation, but coincidence can’t be ruled out, something a perpetrator would of course have built into its calculations. 

“Fishing vessels accidentally damage cables with anchors,” a spokesperson for the company at the Swedish end of the connection with Lithuania, Arelion, told the BBC. “The timing is odd of course, but we haven’t been able to examine it so we don’t know what caused it,” he said.

For pessimists, it will look like another example of hybrid warfare — conducting aggressive acts while hiding behind plausible deniability and the vacuum often created around disputed events. Russia, not coincidentally, has practiced this doctrine stretching back to the Cold War. The intention is not to argue against the truth so much as confuse where certainty might lie.