Police in Norway seized and boarded a Norwegian ship with an all-Russian crew on suspicion of involvement in causing damage to a telecoms cable under the Baltic Sea on Friday.
The Silver Dania cargo ship was grabbed at the request of Latvia and with the assistance of the Norwegian coast guard, police in the city of Tromso said.
Tromso lies in the far north of the Nordic nation.
The Silver Dania’s owner, the Silver Sea shipping group, denied that it had been involved in the undersea cable damage, Norway’s TV2 channel reported.
Norwegian police confirmed that both ship seizures were related to the cable breakage.
“The suspicion is that someone on the [Silver Dania] has something to do with the cable incident,” police lawyer Ronny Joergensen told a press conference, declining to elaborate further.
The Swedish prosecutor handling the sabotage investigation, Mats Ljungqvist, said he now had a clearer idea of what happened and that he believed that the Vezhen was the cause of the cable damage.
“Our view is that it is the vessel that we have seized that has caused the cable break,” he told Reuters.
“We have looked at the vessel that has been seized in Norway, but for various reasons we have dismissed it.”
He declined to comment further, citing confidentiality.
The head of the Bulgarian company, Navigation Maritime Bulgare, that operates the Vezhen acknowledged on Monday its anchor may have struck the Baltic undersea cable by accident but denied any malicious intent.
The ship that was seized in Norway was Norwegian-owned and flagged and had been sailing from St. Petersburg in the Baltic Sea to Murmansk in the Russian Arctic, police said.
The owner and crew of the Silver Dania had voluntarily agreed that it would follow a coast guard vessel to port, the police added.
Latvia’s state police confirmed they had requested the arrest in Norway.
“We are in close contact with the Norwegian law enforcement authorities, but in the interest of investigation, we will not comment further at this time,” a Latvian police spokesperson said.
The Baltic Sea region has been on high alert due to a string of power cable, telecom link, and gas pipeline outages since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago.
On Jan. 14, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said that enhanced military activity he called “Baltic Sentry,” involving a range of assets—including frigates, maritime patrol aircraft military presence, and fleets of naval drones—will respond to “destabilizing acts.”
On Dec. 25, 2024, Finnish police seized the Eagle S tanker carrying Russian oil, saying it suspected the vessel had dragged its anchor along the seabed, damaging the Estonia–Finland Estlink 2 power line and four telecoms cables.
Finland’s actions against the tanker showed that ships causing harm can be apprehended by law enforcement, Rutte said.
“Ship captains must understand that potential threats to our infrastructure will have consequences, including possible boarding, impounding, and arrest,” Rutte said.
Pevkur compared the charge to an airport landing fee and said it would be “basically an insurance fee.”
