ISTANBUL
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Tuesday announced a new mission, Baltic Sentry, aimed at protecting critical undersea cables in the Baltic Sea region.
Speaking at a meeting with leaders of NATO countries bordering the Baltic Sea, Rutte highlighted the growing importance of these cables and the need to address emerging threats in the region.
“Today, I can announce that NATO is launching Baltic Sentry under the authority of NATO supreme allied commander,” Rutte said.
“This military activity is part of our ongoing effort to enhance maritime presence and monitoring of key areas for our alliance," he added.
The operation will deploy a variety of assets, including frigates, maritime patrol aircraft, and naval drones.
“We have agreed today to launch an initiative to employ and deploy new technologies to this effort, including a small fleet of naval drones to provide enhanced surveillance and deterrence,” Rutte stated.
The Baltic Sentry mission comes amid concerns over potential sabotage of undersea cables and other destabilizing activities in the region.
“Across the alliance, we have seen elements of a campaign to destabilize our societies through cyberattacks, assassination attempts, and sabotage, including possible sabotage of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea,” Rutte said.
To strengthen NATO’s vigilance, the mission will integrate national surveillance systems with alliance resources.
“We are also working with allies to integrate their national surveillance assets with NATO, ensuring comprehensive threat detection,” Rutte said.
He also emphasized the need for firm action against threats to critical infrastructure.
“Ship captains must understand that potential threats to our infrastructure will have consequences, including possible boarding, impounding, and arrest,” Rutte warned.
- Call for ‘investing more in collective defense’
While law enforcement remains under the jurisdiction of national authorities, he said: “We are best served when there is complementarity between NATO's efforts to detect threats and deter aggression and national efforts to enforce the law.”
In addition to deterrence, Rutte underscored the importance of resilience. “Enhancing resilience requires safer, more repairable, and more redundant infrastructure,” he said, adding that NATO would work with industry operators to “better protect and secure vital undersea assets.”
He also warned of the need to boost defense investments to ensure long-term security.
“My biggest worry is that in four or five years, we are not (safe) if we will not invest more in our collective defense, if we will not do more to ramp up our industry production,” he stated.
Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, for his part, said, "We will continue to act robustly when critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea is in danger."
Highlighting NATO’s role, Stubb said: “We will increase NATO's presence in the Baltic Sea” and pledged to address “the shadow fleet of Russia robustly.”
He also announced that they are planning to spearhead the establishment of a group of legal experts from Baltic Sea states to evaluate freedom of navigation under international law.
Estonia’s Prime Minister Kristen Michal accused Russia of engaging in hybrid warfare.
"To be honest, they are running money from Russia to have this kind of hybrid war against Europe,” he said.
Advocating for a firm response, he suggested that “probably the Finnish attitude should be a benchmark” for future incidents involving threats or sabotage attempts against critical infrastructure.
- Baltic Sea incidents
The Baltic Sea has been the scene of several high-profile infrastructure incidents since the onset of Russia's war on Ukraine in February 2022, which heightened tensions in the region.
Most recently, Finland reported that Eagle S tanker had been detained in connection with the subsea cable damage incident that occurred on Christmas Day.
Last November, two telecommunications cables linking Sweden and Denmark were severed. Authorities suspect the Chinese vessel Yi Peng 3, which sailed over the cables, while China denied Sweden's request to investigate the ship.
The Arelion submarine cable, which connects the Swedish island of Gotland to Lithuania, and the C-Lion 1 submarine communications cable that runs between Finland’s capital Helsinki and Germany’s Rostock city, were also damaged in mid-November near Sweden's territorial waters.
European officials have suggested that sabotage could be behind the recent disruptions, potentially linked to Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. But the Kremlin has rejected the claims, calling them “absurd.”
The September 2022 explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream pipelines carrying Russian gas to Europe remain unresolved, underscoring the region's vulnerability to undersea attacks on key infrastructure.
Authorities across the Baltic region continue to investigate these incidents amid heightened vigilance as geopolitical tensions show no sign of abating.
