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Sweden has proof that a small foreign submarine was operating illegally in its waters last month, its top military officer said yesterday after a mysterious episode that triggered the country’s biggest military mobilisation since the Cold War. |
More than 200 troops, stealth ships and helicopters scoured Baltic waters off the capital Stockholm in October after reports of foreign “underwater activity”, but without finding or bringing to the surface any submarine.
“The military can confirm that a small U-boat breached Sweden’s territorial waters. We can exclude all alternative explanations,” the head of Sweden’s armed forces, General Sverker Goransson, told a news conference.
He said Sweden had not been able to identify which country was behind the intrusion.
The submarine’s presence was picked up by military sensors, Goransson said.
Supporting evidence, he said, included a picture showing a bubble pattern typical of a diving submarine and a sonar image of tracks on the sea floor.
Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said that the intrusion into Swedish territorial water was unacceptable and that Sweden would bolster its capabilities in detecting and identifying such activity.
“We will defend Sweden’s territorial integrity with all available means,” Lofven said.
The submarine hunt reflected tensions in a region where governments are increasingly worried about Russian assertiveness because of Moscow’s role in the Ukraine crisis.
Sweden has already said it will increase spending on its military, including up to 70 new fighter jets and new submarines, as it looks to reverse decades of underspending on its armed forces.
The Nordic country has also drawn closer to Nato in the past few years although the current government has ruled out seeking membership of the alliance.
The October submarine hunt was triggered after sightings of a “man-made object” on October 17 – later matched by hundreds of reports from members of the public who thought they saw “something” in waters near Stockholm – and evoked memories of dozens of dramatic Cold War U-boat hunts in the 1980s.
In the most dramatic incident, a Soviet submarine U137 ran aground close to one of Sweden’s largest naval bases in 1981 and was only allowed to leave after a humiliating wait.
Apart from that incident and several confirmed visual sightings, Sweden has never produced hard evidence of a Russian submarine in its waters.
Tomas Ries, an expert at the Swedish National Defence College said yesterday’s announcement was a major breakthrough for the Swedish military.
“During 10 years of obsessive Cold War submarine hunts, they never came up with anything, nothing at all,” he told news agency TT. “It’s very uplifting to know that we have succeeded.”
However Sweden’s armed forces commander refused to disclose details of the evidence or comment on how the navy detected a submarine but failed to identify its origin, citing national security interests.
“How we have done that with our sensors I won’t go into because that’s top secret and that would reveal the capability that we have in our systems,” Goeranson said.