MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
NATO has launched a naval mission aimed at protecting its allies' critical undersea cables and pipelines. Nordic and Baltic governments believe this infrastructure is a target of sabotage likely by Russia. Teri Schultz joined a patrol off the coast of Sweden to see what that protection looks like.
TERI SCHULTZ, BYLINE: The HMS Carlskrona is on a mission.
(CROSSTALK)
SCHULTZ: The potential weapon this Swedish warship is seeking to neutralize is remarkably low tech - heavy iron anchors, which have just one simple maneuver - fall off a vessel passing through the Baltic Sea and break the cables and pipelines below. Over the last 16 months, this has happened four times, disrupting and damaging vital links between NATO allies at a cost of tens of millions of euros.
LARS: The incident was out from Latvia...
SCHULTZ: Yeah.
LARS: ...Over here, passing north of Gotland.
SCHULTZ: That's one of the Carlskrona's navigators, Lars, who declines to give his last name for security reasons, pointing out on a monitor where a fiber-optic cable with Latvia was hit on January 26
LARS: Somewhere in this area is where the damage was made to the cable.
SCHULTZ: In that incident, Sweden seized a ship which had just passed through and was missing its anchor. Finland had set a precedent for this a month earlier by boarding and impounding a tanker whose anchor severed an undersea electricity line. Calling such incidents a grave concern, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has launched a new naval operation, Baltic Sentry, stepping up existing surveillance with more ships like the Carlskrona, adding more airplanes and drones.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARK RUTTE: We will do everything in our power to make sure that we fight back, that we are able to see what is happening and then take the next steps to make sure that it doesn't happen again. And our adversaries should know this.
SCHULTZ: NATO suspects its adversaries are actually behind the incidents. Two of the suspect ships have been Chinese owned. All of them have been sailing to or from Russia when the damage occurred. At least three of the four are suspected of being part of what's called Moscow's shadow fleet - tankers carrying Russian oil with the aim to evade international sanctions imposed for the war on Ukraine. In all four cases, the ships' operators acknowledge causing the damage but insist it wasn't on purpose, and that crews didn't see anything amiss. Some of those ships dragged their anchors for a hundred miles or more.
(SOUNDBITE OF SHIP HORN BLOWING)
SCHULTZ: Aboard the Carlskrona, Dutch Admiral Arjen Warnaar, commander of one of NATO's maritime groups, is extremely skeptical.
If your anchor falls off, and they weigh about 12 tons, as I understand it...
ARJEN WARNAAR: You're going to notice.
SCHULTZ: How long would it take you to notice?
WARNAAR: Two seconds - if that happens, there's a lot of noise, and you're going to see a difference in the way your ship handles. For me, it's very hard to believe this is an accident.
SCHULTZ: But while this scenario may be highly improbable, it's apparently not impossible. In that latest incident, Swedish investigators concluded the vessel's anchor had, in fact, slipped out of faulty locks. It released the ship last week.
(SOUNDBITE OF SHIP ENGINE RUNNING)
SCHULTZ: On this patrol, the Carlskrona didn't see any suspicious behavior from the vessels sharing the waterways. But NATO hopes that simply having more of its crews eyeballing the Baltic like this will make any ship with a potentially loose anchor do more to keep it above board. For NPR News, I'm Teri Schultz, aboard the HMS Carlskrona in the Baltic Sea. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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