The Daily View: Enemy actions
Your latest edition of Lloyd’s List’s Daily View — the essential briefing on the stories shaping shipping
ONCE is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action, says Auric Goldfinger, the archetypal Bond villain who hailed from Latvia.
The Bulgarian operators of the latest ship to be accused of damaging undersea cables (this time connecting Goldfinger’s Latvia with Sweden) are pointing to bad weather and, potentially, accidental anchor dragging to explain the third such incident in the Baltic Sea in the past three months.
Perhaps. Accidents do, after all, happen at sea.
But the executive team of Navibulgar have their work cut out to convince understandably sceptical Baltic politicians and the various intelligence services knocking on their door that it is mere coincidence behind the flurry of undersea cable cutting accidents.
Sweden’s intelligence services, aided by Nato, will take the first stab at getting to the bottom of whether the bulk carrier Vezhen (IMO: 9937270) is responsible for another case of aggravated sabotage.
Those details matter. If, as Nato intelligence officials suspect, Russia’s so-called “grey zone” operations lie behind some or all of these cable cutting incidents, then evidence needs to be laid bare.
The outcome of the current ongoing investigations, however thorough, are unlikely to quell the political storm blowing through the Baltic coastal states. Tensions are running high and there is a growing support for proactive measures to be taken against ships considered to be a danger to coastal states.
That cuts both ways.
The protection to freedom of navigation provided by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea only goes so far and there will be a point at which geopolitical and security concerns override such principles.
For freedom of navigation to be upheld as a concept internationally the rules matter and Baltic states must now tread a careful line in their response to perceived threats.
Richard Meade
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List