Danish navy shadow Chinese cargo ship suspected of being involved in sabotage attack on underwater cables

Denmarks navy said Wednesday it was shadowing a Chinese cargo vessel in the Baltic Sea, a day after Finland and Sweden opened investigations into suspected sabotage of two severed undersea telecoms cables.

The Danish Defence can confirm that we are present in the area near the Chinese ship Yi Peng 3, the military wrote in an email to AFP, adding that it would make no further comment for the time-being.

The cargo ship, built in 2001 and owned by Chinese company Ningbo Yipeng Shipping Co, stopped overnight Tuesday to Wednesday in the Kattegat strait between Denmark and southwestern Sweden, according to the ship tracking site Marinetraffic.

The tracker also showed that the Yi Peng 3 had on Monday been in the area of the C-Lion 1 cable linking Finland to Germany when it was damaged, though there is nothing to indicate that it was involved in the incident.

Early Sunday, another telecoms cable, the Arelion, running from the Swedish Baltic Sea island of Gotland to Lithuania, was also damaged.

On Tuesday, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said the severed cables were likely the result of sabotage.

Nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed, he said on the sidelines of a meeting of EU ministers in Brussels.

The foreign ministries of Finland and Germany had already said on Monday night that the damage raised suspicion of sabotage.

The Chinese ship, the bulk carrier Yi Peng 3 is anchored and being monitored by a Danish naval patrol vessel (unseen) in the sea of Kattegat, near the City og Granaa in Jutland, Denmark, on November 20, 2024

It comes a day after Finland and Sweden opened investigations into suspected sabotage of two severed undersea telecoms cables.

Map shows Chinese cargo ship Yi Peng 3 docked in Denmark

They said in a joint statement that it came at a time when ‘our European security is not only under threat from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors’.

The statement added that the countries were investigating the incident, and that it was crucial that such ‘critical infrastructure’ be safeguarded.

The episode recalled other incidents in the same waterway that authorities probed as potentially malicious.  

In October 2023, an undersea gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia had to be closed after it was damaged by the anchor of a Chinese cargo ship.

And in September 2022, a series of underwater blasts ruptured the Nord Stream pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe, the cause of which has yet to be determined.

In August, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ukraines top military commander at the time, Valery Zaluzhny, oversaw the plan to blow up the pipelines.

Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelensky approved of the plan, the paper said.

Ukraine rejected the claims as absolute nonsense.

According to the specialised site VesselFinder, the Yi Peng 3 left the Russian port of Ust Luga, west of Saint Petersburg, on November 15.