MOSCOW/STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Russia dismissed as “absurd” on Wednesday any suggestion that it had been involved in damage caused at the weekend to two fibre-optic data telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea.
European governments accused Russia on Tuesday of escalating hybrid attacks on Ukraine’s Western allies, days after one data cable running between Finland and Germany and one running between Sweden and Lithuania were cut.
European officials stopped short of directly accusing Russia of destroying the cables but Germany, Poland and others said it was likely an act of sabotage.
Asked about the matter on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a regular news briefing: “It is quite absurd to continue to blame Russia for everything without any reason.”
“It is probably laughable against the background of the lack of any reaction to Ukraine’s sabotage activities in the Baltic Sea,” he said, referring to Nord Stream gas pipe explosions in September 2022, blamed by Moscow on Kyiv and Western countries.
In the latest incident, one cable went out of service on Sunday morning, the other less than 24 hours later on Monday. The breaches happened in Sweden’s exclusive economic zone and Swedish prosecutors started a preliminary investigation on Tuesday on suspicion of possible sabotage.
Swedish Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told Reuters on Tuesday that the country’s armed forces and coastguard had picked up ship movements that corresponded with the interruption of two telecoms cables in the Baltic Sea.
The Swedish navy is helping police and prosecutors in the investigation, a naval spokesman said on Wednesday, deploying vessels to the more southerly of the two sites to film and document an operation that is likely to take a few days.
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov in Moscow and Niklas Pollard in Stockholm; Writing by Johan Ahlander; Editing by Gareth Jones)
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