VILNIUS, Jan 4 (Reuters) – An optical cable belonging to a private company has been damaged in the Baltic Sea, Latvia’s Prime Minister Evika Silina said in a statement on Sunday, adding that the circumstances of the incident were under investigation.
The cable connects Lithuania and Latvia, and it was not immediately clear what had caused the incident, Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre said in a separate statement.
The Baltic Sea region is on high alert after a string of power cable, telecom link and gas pipeline outages since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and the NATO military alliance has boosted its presence with frigates, aircraft and naval drones.
The latest incident is made public five days after Finnish police seized a cargo vessel en route from Russia to Israel on suspicion of sabotaging an undersea telecoms cable running from Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland to Estonia.
(Reporting by Andrius Sytas, editing by Terje Solsvik and Gwladys Fouche)
