NATO announces a deployment in the Baltic to stop Russian sabotage

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has announced that the Alliance will launch a new mission to protect submarine cables in the Baltic Sea region. The countries in the area have denounced that they are targets of sabotage with which Russia disrupts their electricity supply and communications.

NATO countries will deploy naval frigates, planes and drones in the Baltic Sea to help protect critical infrastructure and reserve the right to take action against ships suspected of posing a security threat, alliance members said.

Rutte explained in a meeting in Helsinki with the leaders of the NATO countries in the area that The operation will be called ‘Baltic Sentinel’. The summit comes at a time when a series of incidents in the Baltics have raised concerns about possible Russian activity in the region.

Last month, Finnish police seized a tanker carrying Russian oil and said they suspected the vessel had damaged Finnish-Estonian power line Estlink 2 and four telecommunications cables as he dragged his anchor across the seabed. The crew of the tanker, the ‘Eagle S’, was preparing to cut another cable and a gas pipeline when Finnish authorities boarded the ship, the head of the investigation, Risto Lohi, told Reuters. There were a total of 24 crew members on board. These days they are carrying out interrogations and investigations. The ship has been confiscated.

Another similar incident was carried out by the Chinese ship ‘Yi Peng 3’, which is also suspected of being involved in damage to telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea. He was detained by Danish warships at the end of November. In early January, Sweden’s Civil Defense Minister Karl-Oskar Bohlin said the ship was also planning to cut an electrical cable connecting the Baltic and Nordic countries.

The new mission “will involve a wide range of assets, including frigates and maritime patrol aircraft, among others, and will increase our surveillance in the Baltic,” Rutte said. He also mentioned that a small fleet of maritime drones will be deployed “to provide better surveillance and deterrence.”

Finland’s actions against the ‘Eagle S’ oil tanker show that ships that cause damage can be stopped by law enforcement, said the NATO Secretary General, at the press conference after the meeting, which he cited in Helsinki to the eight nations bathed by the Baltic. Finland’s actions against the ‘Eagle S’ oil tanker showed that lShips that cause damage can be stopped by law enforcement, the NATO secretary general noted at a press conference after an eight-nation meeting in Helsinki on Tuesday.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that he will work with his allies to seek legal means to stop ships in the Baltic Sea that are outside the countries’ territorial waters. Finnish President Alexander Stubb said more legal studies should be carried out to assess what measures can be taken against suspicious ships, while preserving freedom of navigation rules.

Suspicious activities do not stop occurring. Polish state broadcaster TVP World reported on Tuesday that a ship from Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ had been seen circling the undersea Baltic Pipe gas pipeline carrying gas from Norway to Poland, although there were no immediate signs of damage.

About 2,000 ships cross the Baltic Sea every day, making it difficult to fully track them, said Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics. “But if we send a strong signal, I think these types of incidents will decrease or even stop,” Rinkevics told reporters.

Rutte has said that NATO’s adversaries need to know that the alliance will not accept attacks on its critical infrastructure, stressing that they will do “everything in our power to make sure we fight back.”

More than 95% of Internet traffic is insured through submarine cableswith 1.3 million kilometers of cables that guarantee financial transactions worth an estimated $10 trillion daily. To protect them and to send a joint message of a deterrent nature, the deployment was announced after this summit co-organized by Finland and Estonia, which included leaders from Denmark, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden. All of them have their neighbor Russia as the center of their concerns.

But the most serious event occurred in 2022 and suspicions go in the opposite direction: the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany, which run along the seabed of the same waters, were detonated. The investigation has found indications that Ukraine was responsible in that case.