NATO to step up action against Russian, Chinese ‘sabotage’

Critical infrastructure in several NATO states has been damaged in recent months, with ‘sabotage’ suspected.

NATO will boost intelligence collaboration to counter Russian and Chinese “sabotage” targeting its infrastructure, the chief of the Western military alliance has announced.

Mark Rutte outlined the plan as the foreign ministers of NATO’s states gathered in Brussels on Tuesday. He spoke as questions swirled about damage to a data cable linking Sweden and Finland, the latest incident to stir suspicion.

“Over the past years, Russia and China have tried to destabilise our nations with acts of sabotage, cyberattacks, disinformation and energy blackmail to intimidate us,” Rutte told reporters at the NATO gathering.

“NATO allies will continue to stand together to face these threats through a range of measures, including greater intelligence sharing and better protection of critical infrastructure.”

Cable breaches

NATO’s intelligence-sharing push came as authorities in Sweden and Finland – both of which have joined the alliance since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – probed how the cross-border cable was severed.

The land-based fibre-optic link was discovered to be damaged in two places on Monday. The resulting outage disrupted services to thousands of clients.

Swedish Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said his country suspected “sabotage,” although he did not name a potential culprit.

Finnish authorities said they had no evidence pointing to a crime, but that investigations were continuing.

“We take the situation seriously,” Finland’s Minister of Transport and Communications Lulu Ranne said in a post on X.

According to Nordic telecoms groups GlobalConnect and Elisa, one of the two breaches was likely due to excavation work. GlobalConnect said it was still looking into the second incident.

The breach comes after the rupture of two underwater data cables on the Baltic seabed last month. Those two cables, one running from Finland to Germany and the other from Lithuania to Sweden, were both damaged in Swedish waters. Finnish, Swedish and German authorities have launched investigations.

The C-Lion1 submarine telecommunications cable, which was damaged mid-November, is laid to the bottom of the Baltic Sea on the shore of Helsinki, Finland on October 12, 2015. [Lehtikuva/Heikki Saukkomaa/via Reuters]

Germany’s defence minister at the time said the damage appeared to have been caused by sabotage, though there is no proof at present.

Last week, Sweden formally asked China to cooperate in explaining the rupture of the Baltic Sea data cables where a China-flagged vessel had been sighted.

The United Kingdom’s cybersecurity chief warned on Tuesday that Russia and China are “hostile states” that are increasingly using technology “to cause maximum disruption and destruction”.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies