The two cable breaks near Nord Stream on November 17 and 18 raised suspicions of a Chinese cargo ship being monitored by the Danish Navy in the Kattegat Strait between Denmark and Sweden.
The Chinese ship Yi Peng 3 appears to have passed through the area of the incident in the Baltic Sea. Swedish police have labeled the ship concerned as they are investigating the cable break.
This is the latest in a series of incidents involving gas pipelines or fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea in recent years.
The Baltic Sea has become a hot spot for geopolitical plots since the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines running from Russia to Germany were rocked in an explosion in September 2022.
More than two years later, despite widespread criticism, no one has been held accountable for the Nord Stream explosion.
Since then, the stress has continued to rise.
Just over a year after the Nord Stream explosion, in October 2023, the Balticconnector gas pipeline connecting Finland and Estonia was damaged in an undersea incident. Some nearby cables were also broken.
Investigators in Finland and Estonia accused a Chinese container ship of dragging its anchor at the seabed of damaging the pipeline and taking six months to repair.
Why is the Baltic Sea becoming a hot spot for underwater sabotage? Al Jazeera reports that the main reason is geography. The Baltic Sea has shallow and narrow basins, 3 bottlenecks and is surrounded by 8 NATO countries.
The Baltic Sea also borders Russia, with Saint Petersburg, the country's second largest city, located in the eastern corner of the Gulf of Finland. Russia's Baltic fleet is also located in the Kaliningrad exclave.
Tormod Heier, a professor at the Norwegian National Defense University, pointed out that post-Cold War tensions in the region began in 2004 when the three Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - joined NATO. The Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out in 2022 and the joining of Sweden and Finland to NATO in 2024 increased tensions.
According to Al Jazeera, the fiber optic cable breaks and gas pipeline failures, although uncertain, are likely to be caused by sabotage.
Submarine sabotage is a method of hybrid warfare a military strategy used to destabilize regions or countries rather than triggering a total war.
Professor Ashok Swain - head of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden, said that the nature of hybrid warfare is that each country has its own version of the story.
Underwater sabotage incidents such as the Nord Stream explosion and the cable break are less dangerous. Professor Heier pointed out that all affected countries have a high level of redundancy additional or backup systems available in case of damaged cables or pipelines. As a result, there were few disruptions in communications or power supply.
If it poses little risk, the advantage of underwater mixed warfare is to cause anxiety and sow fear. If the evil guys target NATO countries, their aim is to disrupt the political and social cohesion here.
