Sweden has released the “Vezhen” ship, which was detained due to suspicions of sabotage on an East Sea cable and the charges have been dropped. The freighter, owned by a Bulgarian company and flying the Maltese flag, was suspected of intentionally damaging a communication cable between Sweden and Latvia. The ship was also linked to the so-called “Russian Shadow Fleet”.
Now, Swedish authorities have had to admit that the sabotage suspicion did not materialize. While the “Vezhen” did indeed cause the damage to the cable, it was a combination of weather conditions and equipment and seamanship defects that was the cause. In other words, the Swedish prosecutor’s office is only investigating a case of negligent property damage, which is not a criminal offense. Civil claims against the ship’s owner or the ship’s insurer remain unaffected.
The damage to the glass fiber cable of the Latvian Radio and Television Center was discovered at the end of January. As part of the sabotage investigations, several ships were inspected. The Bulgarian owner of the “Vezhen” has consistently denied the allegations and cited the poor weather at the time of the incident.
In recent months, several reports of damage to power lines and communication cables in the Baltic Sea have been made. The cause of this remains unclear, but the blame attributions from the media and politics have always been the same: Russia is attacking Europe, so the hasty narrative goes. Officials from various Baltic Sea littoral states are investigating the suspicion that ships may have cut the cables at the seafloor with their anchors.