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

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.

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.