The authorities in Norway have seized a Russian-crewed ship that’s suspected of damaging an undersea cable in an act of sabotage within the Baltic Sea, the Norwegian police mentioned on Friday.
They have been performing on a request from the Latvian authorities and on an order issued in Norwegian courts, the police said in a statement, after an undersea cable that runs between Sweden and Latvia was broken this week.
It’s the newest in a rising variety of acts of injury or sabotage to undersea infrastructure within the Baltic Sea, together with to cables used for communication and for the distribution of electrical energy. In response to at least one such occasion in December, NATO has stepped up its patrol and surveillance operation within the Baltic Sea.
Concern about such harm has been rising since a series of undersea explosions blew aside the Nord Stream pure gasoline pipelines linking Russia to Western Europe in 2022.
On Thursday night, Norway’s coast guard and police surrounded the Russian-crewed ship — the Silver Dania, a vessel owned and registered in Norway — and towed it into the Port of Tromso on Friday morning, the police mentioned.
The ship, a 36-year-old cargo vessel, according to shipping data, was crusing between the Russian ports of St. Petersburg and Murmansk. The police mentioned that officers had boarded the ship to seek for proof and to query the crew in relation to the broken cable.
The vessel’s house owners, a transport firm referred to as Silver Sea, denied any wrongdoing. “We agreed to go to a Norwegian port to be checked out,” Tormod Fossmark, the corporate’s chief government officer, told the Norwegian news media. He mentioned that the corporate was complying with a request from the authorities.
On Monday, the authorities in Sweden boarded a different ship in reference to what they described as an act of “gross sabotage” of the Sweden-to-Latvia undersea cable a day earlier. They detained the majority service, which is owned by a Bulgarian transport firm and was flying a Maltese flag.
Russian involvement was suspected within the December slicing of an undersea cable that carries electrical energy between Finland and Estonia. In that occasion, the Finnish authorities seized an oil tanker as they seemed into whether or not the ship’s anchor had reduce the cable.
Leaders in Finland and Estonia mentioned they believed that the tanker is perhaps a part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” of ships aimed toward circumventing Western-imposed worth caps on Russian sea-transported oil due to Moscow’s conflict in Ukraine. Such ships have more and more come underneath suspicion for their role in acts of sabotage as a tactic of hybrid warfare between Russia and NATO.
