On Sunday 26 January 2025, yet another Baltic Sea communications cable was found damaged, this time one between Latvia and the Swedish island of Gotland. The cable is owned by the Latvian state-company for TV and radio.

Swedish authorities have impounded the ship Vezhen, sailing under the flag of Malta, as suspect of the damage to the subsea data cable. The Vezhen left Russia earlier and was heading towards Denmark, the Latvian authorities say. On Sunday it was reported to have changed its course towards the Swedish naval city of Karlskrona, after which the Swedish Coast Guard boarded the vessel.

The last couple of months, damages to cables of NATO countries in the Baltic Sea area have been common. In all cases, the ships had either left Russia or were part of Russia’s so-called shadow merchant fleet that by-passes the economic sanctions installed after Russia invaded Ukraine at full scale in February 2022.

UPDATE 3 FEBRUARY: Not sabotage

“The investigation now clearly shows that this is not sabotage,” the Swedish Public Prosecjutor Mats Ljungqvist said on 3 February in a press statement. “It has been determined that a combination of weather conditions and deficiencies in equipment and seamanship contributed to the cable break.”

With the announcement the Vezhen and its crew are free to leave Sweden again. They were ordered to lay idle off the coast of Karlskrona. | © 2025 Marcel Burger, nordicreporter.com