The authorities in Norway have seized a Russian-crewed ship that is suspected of damaging an undersea cable in an act of sabotage in the Baltic Sea, the Norwegian police said on Friday.
They were acting 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 damaged this week.
It is the latest in a growing number of acts of damage or sabotage to undersea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea, including to cables used for communication and for the distribution of electricity. In response to one such instance in December, NATO has stepped up its patrol and surveillance operation in the Baltic Sea.
Concern about such damage has been rising since a series of undersea explosions blew apart the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines linking Russia to Western Europe in 2022.
On Thursday evening, 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 said.
The ship, a 36-year-old cargo vessel, according to shipping data, was sailing between the Russian ports of St. Petersburg and Murmansk. The police said that officers had boarded the ship to search for evidence and to question the crew in relation to the damaged cable.
“The ship is suspected of having someone onboard who was involved in this cable incident in the Baltic Sea,” a prosecutor, Ronny Jorgensen, said during a televised news conference. “This is classified as serious vandalism.”
The ship, with a crew of 11, is one of several vessels being investigated, he said, adding that the police had not detained or charged any of the crew members.
The vessel’s owners, a shipping company called Silver Sea, denied any wrongdoing. “We agreed to go to a Norwegian port to be checked out,” Tormod Fossmark, the company’s chief executive officer, told the Norwegian news media. He said that the company was complying with a request from the authorities.
On Monday, the authorities in Sweden boarded a different ship in connection with what they described as an act of “gross sabotage” of the Sweden-to-Latvia undersea cable a day earlier. They detained the bulk carrier, which is owned by a Bulgarian shipping company and was flying a Maltese flag.
Though ships have damaged undersea infrastructure in the Baltic on several occasions over the past year and a half, it was the cutting in December of an undersea cable that carries electricity between Finland and Estonia that prompted authorities in the region to step up security. In that instance, the Finnish authorities seized an oil tanker as they looked into whether the ship’s anchor had cut the cable.
Shortly after, NATO announced the start of an operation called Baltic Sentry, with the deployment of naval vessels and aircraft to monitor the region.
There have been strong suspicions of Russian involvement in the sabotage, but the authorities have yet to release definitive evidence of the Kremlin’s culpability, and Moscow has strongly denied any connection.
Leaders in Finland and Estonia said they believed that the tanker seized in December might be part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” of ships aimed at circumventing Western-imposed price caps on Russian sea-transported oil because of Moscow’s war in Ukraine. Such ships have increasingly come under suspicion for their role in acts of sabotage as a tactic of hybrid warfare between Russia and NATO.
But, officials have cautioned, that episode and others are still under investigation and solid evidence of intentional sabotage may never come to light.
Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting.
