Polish PM Proposes Joint Naval Policing in Baltic Sea After Undersea Cable Damage

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk gestures during a press statement in Berlin on March 15, 2024. Annegret Hilse/Reuters

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Wednesday that he will push for the creation of a new “navy policing” program aimed at bolstering security in the Baltic Sea amid threats from Russia.

Speaking from Warsaw, Tusk told reporters he intends to urge Baltic and Nordic countries to take part in the joint patrol program—which he said would be similar to NATO countries’ air policing mission—during an upcoming summit in Sweden.

“I will convince our partners of the need to immediately create an analogous formula when it comes to the control and security of the Baltic waters, to ‘navy policing’, a joint undertaking of the countries that lie on the Baltic Sea and that have the same sense of threat when it comes to Russia,” Tusk said.

Nine countries—Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Sweden—border the Baltic Sea.

Tusk said he would be meeting with the prime ministers of the Baltic and Nordic countries later on Wednesday and Thursday and that the discussions would cover a range of important topics, such as transatlantic relations, regional cooperation on security, and a common policy toward the war in Ukraine.

A data communications cable in the Baltic Sea connecting Finland and Germany was broken earlier in November, prompting an investigation into the cause of the damage.

According to Finnish state-controlled data services provider Cinia, which runs the 1,200-kilometer-long high-speed fiber optic cable, a “fault” in the line was detected on Nov. 18.

As a result, services typically provided through the cable—which runs from the Finnish capital of Helsinki to the German port city of Rostock—went down.

Repair work on the cable is expected to be completed by the end of November, according to Cinia, which is still investigating the matter.

Just 24 hours before that incident, a 218 km (135 mile) internet link between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland run by Telia Lietuva, part of Sweden’s Telia Company, also went offline.

In the wake of the two events, Swedish authorities have focused their attention on a Chinese cargo ship called Yi Peng 3, which left from the Russian port of Ust-Luga and traveled through the Baltic Sea at the time the damages occurred.

A direct link between the ship and the incidents has not been established.

The Yi Peng 3 is currently moored in international waters, inside Denmark’s exclusive economic zone.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Russian government have both denied any involvement in the damage to the cables; with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov telling a news briefing earlier this week that it’s “quite absurd to continue to blame Russia for everything without any reason.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said this week that the ministry was unaware of the situation.

There are roughly 400 underwater cables across the world connecting islands, countries, regions, and continents, and more than 97 percent of the world’s internet traffic passes through those subsea cables at some point, according to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA).

Accidental, unintentional damage through fishing or anchoring has so far been the cause of most subsea cable incidents, according to the agency.

Lily Zhou, Owen Evans, and Reuters contributed to this report.