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A critical underwater internet cable linking Finland to Germany has been severed, sparking fears of Russian sabotage.
The incident happened in the vicinity of the Swedish island of Gotland, in the Baltic Sea, early on Monday morning.
A further cable was also found to be impacted later, according to Cinia, the state-controlled Finnish company that manages the link. The second line runs almost 730 miles next to gas pipelines and power cables.
Cinia said a repair ship had been sent to investigate the cause of the outage, which has hit the only cable connecting the country to central Europe.
Finland’s communications agency said most internet users would not notice Monday’s outage, with the country able to fall back on cables running through other parts of the continent.
The company said that, while there was no indication that the damage was sabotage, it was likely to have been the result of human activity.
Work on the initial installation of the cable – Heikki Saukkomaa / Lehtikuva / AFP
“At the moment, there is no way to assess the cause of the cable break, but such breaks without external impact do not happen in these waters,” said Ari-Jussi Knaapila, the chief executive of Cinia.
However, he cautioned that the damage could have been caused by a trawler or a ship that had put down an emergency anchor. The company pointed out that the fibre optic cables are sheathed in a double-armoured steel casing.
Finland is on high alert about possible espionage from Russia after it joined Nato, ending decades of neutrality.
Nato intelligence officials warned in September that Russia was building up a secretive submarine unit tasked with sabotaging undersea infrastructure, while Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president, said such cables were fair game because of Western “complicity” in the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
On Monday, the transport and communications ministry in Helsinki issued new crisis guidelines to the country’s population, which include information on what to do in the event of disruptions to telecommunications infrastructure.
With Russia now surrounded by Nato states in the Baltic, its waters are seen as most vulnerable to attempts to disrupt key energy and communications lines.
Most dramatically, the Nord Stream pipeline, which brought Russian natural gas to Germany, was blown up half a year after Russia invaded Ukraine. While investigations into that incident continue, the saboteurs are believed to have been sent from Kyiv.
In October last year, a Chinese cargo vessel damaged a gas line between Finland and Estonia with its anchor. The Chinese authorities’ explanation that the incident was an accident has been viewed with suspicion in the West.