Latvia is pressing ahead with its investigation into the latest subsea cable cutting incident in the region, even after police said they have found no evidence linking a ship inspected in Liepaja to the damage.
Latvian authorities said on Monday that an underwater telecommunications cable running between Latvia and Lithuania was damaged on Friday near the port city of Liepaja, but initial checks have not tied the incident to a vessel currently docked there. Criminal proceedings remain open as investigators continue to examine all possible causes.
“At present, the information obtained in the criminal case does not indicate a connection of the specific ship with the damage to the optical cable,” Latvia’s national police said in a statement.
The cable belongs to Swedish fibre-optics group Arelion, which confirmed that the Latvia–Lithuania link was fully severed. The incident comes amid heightened concern across the Baltic Sea following a series of power cable, telecoms and gas pipeline outages since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. NATO has since increased its regional presence with frigates, aircraft and naval drones.
Latvian police said they boarded and inspected a vessel at Liepaja over the weekend, examining its anchor, technical equipment and logs. The crew cooperated voluntarily and were not detained. MarineTraffic data showed that four ships crossed the Lithuania–Latvia cable route en route to Liepaja on January 2, the day the damage is believed to have occurred, with three of those vessels still in port on Monday.
The case follows closely on a high-profile incident in Finland, where police seized a cargo ship on December 31 on suspicion of sabotaging an Elisa telecoms cable between Finland and Estonia by dragging its anchor across the seabed while sailing from Russia to Israel.
Arelion said the damage in the region is not limited to a single line with three cables fully severed, namely the Latvia–Lithuania cable, a Finland–Estonia link damaged on December 31, and a separate cable between Estonia and Sweden that stopped working on December 30.
Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre said the damaged cable runs between Sventoji in Lithuania and Liepaja in Latvia, a distance of around 65 km, adding that the cause of the outage remains unclear.