Two weeks before the Baltic’s three former Soviet republics are to cut their Stalin-era electricity ties to Moscow, a ship damaged yesterday an undersea fiber optic cable between Latvia and Sweden. Swedish prosecutors immediately detained the ship near Sweden’s largest naval base, Karlskrona, and opened a sabotage investigation.

A Bulgarian company owns the Maltese-flagged ship, the Vezhen. The head of the owner company, Captain Aleksandar Kalchev, told Reuters today the Vezhen might have struck the Baltic undersea cable when it dropped anchor yesterday in high winds. He said the crew was initially held at gunpoint.

Yesterday’s fast action is due to a new “Baltic Sentry” program, a combined sea and air patrol of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Baltic surveillance started after Russian and Chinese vessels were suspected of cutting undersea cables by dragging their anchors along the seabed.

“I don’t believe in coincidences when it comes to frequent cases of damage to underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea,” Estonia’s foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, posted on X today.

A month ago, on Christmas Day, Finnish investigators say an oil tanker, the Eagle S, cut one of two power lines linking Estonia and Finland. The investigators say the ship was preparing to cut the second electricity cable when Finnish helicopters lowered commandos landed on the ship’s decks. 

The attacks come as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania prepare to cut on February 8 their electricity links to Russia and Belarus. These electricity ties date back to 1944 when Moscow forcibly annexed the three countries into the Soviet Union. Although the USSR collapsed in 1991, it has taken 15 years of work and $1.7 billion in investments to allow the three countries to cut their electricity ties with Moscow and to integrate into Europe’s energy grid.

To mark this historic moment, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė of Lithuania unveiled on October 31 a 100-day “countdown monument” in front of Lithuania’s Energy and Technology Museum in Vilnius. Referring to Russia, she hailed: “The dignity of standing firm against those who view energy merely as a tool for power, blackmail, and coercion…energy independence — like national independence — is an achievement that must continue to be protected and strengthened.” 

However, after the cable-cutting operations of November, December, and January, Baltic officials are playing down the transition, formally known as “synchronisation.” They know that Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine came on February 24, 2022 — the same day that Ukraine disconnected from the Russian and Belarussian grid, performing an “isolated mode” test.

The coincidence between the Baltics’ energy independence target date and the cable cutting campaign has been missed by some outside observers. Last week, the Washington Post posted an “exclusive” story with this headline: “Accidents, not Russian sabotage, behind undersea cable damage, officials say.”

The Post reported: “U.S. and European officials said that the evidence gathered to date — including intercepted communications and other classified intelligence — points to accidents caused by inexperienced crews serving aboard poorly maintained vessels.”

The article was met with derision by Baltic analysts. “With today’s breakage, the Baltic Sea has a 25.6 times higher frequency of cable ‘accidents’ than normal levels,”   regional maritime blogger “Auonsson” calculates on Bluesky. With the Baltic Sea accounting for about 5 percent of world maritime traffic, anchor breaks or damages to cables should average 1.5 cases a year. Instead, she writes, there have been eight breaks in the last 2.5 months.

A Finnish political scientist, Mika Aaltola, a member of the European Parliament, wrote last week in the Kyiv Independent: “It would be naïve to assume that the repeated cutting of cables in the Baltic Sea, along with the recent leak, is purely accidental.”

“Instead of downplaying these actions, a strong message of strategic resolve must be sent to Moscow,” he wrote, attributing the intelligence agency leaks to a Russia appeasement agenda among officials of some Western governments. “The cable-cutting occurred due to the self-evident, deliberate, and negligent actions of Russia’s shadow fleet.”

In Lithuania, Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys posted on X: “Inaction is a dangerous gamble — and it’s only making things worse. The Baltic Sea is becoming a zone of hostile activity, with Russia abusing shipping & aviation rules, jamming GPS, causing environmental & security risks. We must seize control of maritime traffic, criminalize violations & deploy NATO naval forces to assert dominance & security of the Baltic Sea.”

Russia increasingly worries about losing access to the Baltic Sea. Half of Russia’s energy exports — oil, gas and coal — go out through the Baltic. In the last two years, Finland and Sweden joined the North Atlantic Treaty, essentially rendering the Baltic “a NATO lake.” In each of the last two years, NATO warplanes have scrambled more than 300 times to intercept Russian war jets heading into NATO air space.

“Clearly, the steps of the North Atlantic Alliance are aimed primarily not at increasing security but rather at ‘containing’ our country,” a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, told reporters in Moscow last Thursday. One week earlier, she told reporters: “The real purpose of all this is to limit Russian oil exports by any means necessary…and to create the preconditions for the introduction of arbitrary restrictions on international shipping in the Baltic Sea.”

Increasingly, Western militaries are studying the movements of Russian ships in relation to undersea cables. Last week, the British defense secretary, John Healey, accused a Russian spy ship of “loitering” over internet cables in the English Channel. He said in a written statement: “We will continue to call out the malign activity that Putin directs, cracking down on the Russian shadow fleet to prevent funding for his illegal invasion of Ukraine.”