NATO mission: Sweden participates with three ships in the Baltic Sea

The new NATO member Sweden will take part in a military alliance operation in the Baltic Sea with three warships and a surveillance aircraft. The aim of the mission is to protect underwater cables, as Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson announced at a defense conference.

The background is cable breaks in the Baltic Sea that are believed to have been caused by sabotage, and are believed to be caused by a ship from the so-called Russian shadow fleet and a Chinese ship. According to information from the German Press Agency, a total of around ten ships are expected to take part in the NATO mission to protect the cables. There was initially no official information available from the alliance headquarters in Brussels.

Kristersson held back from assigning specific blame, as the Swedish news agency TT reported. However, one is not naive, said the liberal-conservative politician. The fact that strange things keep happening in the Baltic Sea leads to the assumption that hostile intentions cannot be ruled out, said Kristersson. Sweden and its neighbors no longer tolerated this.

An undersea power cable running between Finland and Estonia and several communication cables were damaged in the Gulf of Finland at Christmas.

Finnish police suspect that the Cook Islands-flagged oil tanker “Eagle S” intentionally caused the damage with its anchor. She is therefore investigating possible sabotage. The ship was also near another power cable. According to the EU’s assessment, the “Eagle S” belongs to the Russian shadow fleet. This refers to tankers and other cargo ships that Russia uses to avoid sanctions following its invasion of Ukraine, for example when transporting oil.

In mid-November 2024, communication cables in the Baltic Sea had already been damaged: one between Finland and Germany and the other between Sweden and Lithuania. The Chinese cargo ship “Yi Peng 3” is suspected. The ship has been anchored in the Kattegat between Denmark and Sweden for weeks, while patrol ships from Germany and other NATO countries are with it continuously.

According to Sweden’s Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin, the “Yi Peng 3” may also be responsible for a newly discovered anchor drag mark near another undersea power cable between Sweden and Lithuania. Bohlin told the Swedish radio station SVT that he did not want to imply any intention to destroy the cable. But if you drag an anchor 150 kilometers behind you, you should at least notice it, said the politician.

With the recent discovery of drag marks, it is now clear that the three most important power cables between the Nordic countries and the Baltics were at risk, the SVT report said. This could be related to the fact that all three Baltic states are close to ending their dependence on electricity from Russia and Belarus, said Bohlin.