A Danish Navy warship detained today the Chinese bulk carrier, the Yi Peng 3, that is suspected of cutting two undersea cables in the Baltic.

Open source maritime news channel ‘auonsson’ posted on X that a Danish Flying Fish class patrol ship detained the ship as it was trying to flee the Baltic through the Danish straits. The Internet cables were severed Sunday and Monday, just as reports emerged of President Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use American-made missiles to hit military targets up to 200 miles inside Russia.

Last week, as the missile decision appeared increasingly imminent, a key Kremlin advisor, Nikolai Patrushev, publicly accused the United States and the United Kingdom of planning to sabotage underwater internet cables “to promote their economic interests.” At the time, Ukrainian Telegram Channel Crimean Wind said: “Such statements often sound like a cover for their own intentions.” The son of a Soviet Naval officer, Mr. Patrushev was appointed last August chairman of Russia’s new Maritime Board.

The size of garden hoses, hundreds of fiber optic cables crisscross ocean floors, carrying trillions of dollars of business. Around 99 percent of the world’s data run through undersea cables. Some 16 underwater cables run through Germany’s exclusive economic zone in the Baltic — six for data and nine for electricity.

A year ago, another Chinese vessel, the Newnew Polar Bear, dragged its port anchor in the Gulf of Finland, cutting two data cables and severely damaging the Baltic connector gas pipeline to Estonia. In August, an internal Chinese investigation indicated that the ship was responsible for damaging the pipeline between Finland and Estonia. However, the People’s Republic of China, Russia’s biggest ally, claimed it was an accident due to heavy weather, rather than sabotage.

This time, Danish and Swedish officials suspect the Chinese ship severed two undersea cables 60 miles apart in Swedish economic waters. One cable, the C-Lion1, stretches 730 miles from Finland to Rostock, Germany. The other is a 135-mile  link connecting Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island. Two of the countries affected, Finland and Sweden, joined NATO only after Russia’s fullbore attack on Ukraine in 2022.

“No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally,” Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said yesterday at Brussels.  “We also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it is sabotage.”  In Poland, which has a 480-mile Baltic coastline, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said yesterday: “If Russia does not stop committing acts of sabotage in Europe, Warsaw will close the rest of its consulates in Poland.”

Taking superpower rivalries to murky depths, Russia has built up a naval and undersea sabotage unit under an anodyne cover: The Main Directorate for Deep-Sea Research, or GUGI.  An American official told CNN in September: “We are concerned about heightened Russian naval activity worldwide and that Russia’s decision calculus for damaging U.S. and allied undersea critical infrastructure may be changing.”

The U.S. State Department’s spokesperson Matthew Miller said yesterday that the Administration is aware of cable damage in the Baltic and is “incredibly concerned about hybrid warfare.” From a meeting in Warsaw, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland said in a statement: “Moscow’s escalating hybrid activities against NATO and EU countries are  unprecedented in their variety and scale, creating significant security risks.” 

On Friday, the Irish Navy escorted out of Irish economic waters, a Russian spy ship, the Yantar. The American Navy says this  intelligence gathering ship is a mothership for two mini subs capable of cutting cables 20,000 feet below the surface.  

Part of the GUGI unit, the Yantar had been spotted earlier last week in the English Channel with the Admiral Golovko, a Russian frigate equipped for anti-submarine warfare. In the Irish Sea, the Yantar turned off its locator devices and moved over an area with undersea cables that carry data between Britain and Ireland. Google and Microsoft have their EU headquarters in Ireland.

“Russia has spent a considerable amount of effort investing in capabilities that would allow it to pose a threat to European critical infrastructure,” Britain’s Royal United Services Institute defense think tank said last year.A joint investigation by the public broadcasters of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden warned that dozens of Russian ships operating in Nordic waters are equipped for sabotage of underwater cables and wind farms.

Yesterday, Swedish Navy ships arrived at the Baltic site of the most recent cable cuts. Today, they are to send mini subs to explore the seabed floor. The Swedish Armed Forces and Coast Guard have recorded ship movements that coincide with the severing of the cables, Sweden’s minister of civil defense, Carl-Oscar Bohlin, told TV4 yesterday.

Awaiting a decision by Swedish prosecutors, the Danish Navy patrol boats are shadowing the Yi Peng 3 as it proceeds west from the Danish Straits. The carrier is en route from Ust-Luga, near St. Petersburg, to Port Said, and the northern bank of Egypt’s Suez Canal.

In the watery battleground that is now the Baltic, the first sabotage was of three of Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines. They were destroyed seven months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. No one has taken responsibility for the blasts. However, in August, German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diver.

Now, it is the Europeans who are on the defensive. “Putin is playing with our fear,” Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said yesterday at Warsaw. “We cannot rely on promises from the Kremlin. Instead we must ourselves invest in our security and protection.”