Chinese ship suspected in Baltic Sea cable damage – media

Finland and Sweden have cautioned against jumping to conclusions

A Chinese-registered merchant vessel en route from Russia to Egypt has come under suspicion of possible involvement in damage to two data cables under the Baltic Sea, multiple media outlets have claimed.

The BCS East-West-Interlink, which connects Lithuania to Sweden, was seriously damaged on Sunday, while the C-Lion1 fiber-optic undersea cable from Finland to Germany was cut on Monday morning. The cause of both incidents is so far unknown.

“The Swedes are taking a hard look at the Chinese vessel,” the Financial Times quoted an anonymous source as saying on Wednesday. Maritime trackers identified the ship as Yi Peng 3, owned by Ningbo Yipeng Shipping.

“The Danish Defense can confirm that we are present in the area near the Chinese ship Yi Peng 3,” the defense ministry in Copenhagen said in a cryptic X post on Wednesday. “The Danish Defense currently has no further comments.”

Maritime tracking websites showed the Chinese ship as having stopped in the Kattegat strait, north of Copenhagen, with two Royal Danish Navy vessels nearby. The ship had departed Ust-Luga in Russia and was headed for Port Said in Egypt.

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“We do not have information on this issue,” the Chinese embassy in Sweden told FT, while a representative of Ningbo Yipeng said only that the Danish government had asked the company to “cooperate with the investigation.”

Finnish officials advised against rushing to judgment on Monday. That has not stopped German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius from blaming “hybrid action.”

“No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally,” Pistorius said on Tuesday. “And we also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it is sabotage.”

Citing anonymous online sources, the German outlet Bild and the US magazine Newsweek have claimed that the captain of the Yi Peng 3 was a Russian national.

The C-Lion1 runs close to the NordStream pipelines, which once delivered natural gas from Russia to Germany. Three out of four tubes were damaged by sabotage in September 2022. No one has taken responsibility for the blasts that disabled the pipelines. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has pointed the finger at the US and Norway. Several Western newspapers have claimed that a group of Ukrainians carried out the bombing.