Sweden criticizes China for denying full access to ship suspected of sabotaging Baltic cables
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Sweden has sharply criticized China for refusing to let the Nordic country’s lead investigator board a Chinese ship suspected of cutting two power cables in the Baltic Sea.
The Yipeng 3 left its anchorage in international waters between Denmark and Sweden on Saturday and appeared to be heading to Egypt after Chinese investigators boarded the ship on Thursday.
According to authorities in Stockholm, the Chinese team allowed representatives from Sweden, Germany, Finland and Denmark to board the ship as observers, but not Swedish prosecutor Henrik Söderman.
“This is a matter that the government takes essentially seriously. It is worth noting that when the ship left, prosecutors did not have the opportunity to inspect the ship and question the crew within the framework of a Swedish criminal investigation,” Foreign Minister Maria Malmö Steiner Gadde said in comments provided to the Financial Times.
The Swedish government put pressure on Chinese authorities to allow the bulk carrier to enter Swedish territory from international waters in order to conduct a full investigation into the cutting of Sweden-Lithuania and Finland-Germany data cables last month.
People close to the investigation said Thursday’s boarding left no doubt it was connected to the incident.
The Yipeng 3 belongs to Ningbo Yipeng Shipping Company, which owns just one other ship and is based near the eastern Chinese port city of Ningbo. A representative for Ningbo Yipeng told the Financial Times in November that “the government has asked the company to cooperate with the investigation” but did not answer further questions.
Countries are divided over the motivations behind cutting cables. Some people familiar with the investigation said they believed the anchor of the Yipeng 3 may have dragged on the seafloor of the Baltic Sea, possibly due to poor navigation skills.
However, other governments have privately said they suspect Russia was behind the damage and may have paid the crew.
The cutting of the two cables was the second time in 13 months that Chinese ships had damaged Baltic Sea infrastructure.
In October 2023, a Chinese container ship, the Newnew Polar Bear, was dragged along the Baltic Sea bottom for a considerable distance during a storm, damaging a natural gas pipeline. Officials were slow to respond to the incident, allowing the ship to leave the area without stopping, a situation they tried to avoid in the case of Yipeng 3.
Nordic and Baltic officials expressed doubts about the possibility of the same thing happening twice in a row. “If this continues to happen innocently, the Chinese must be really terrible captains,” said one Baltic minister.
