Sweden launches hunt for intruding vessel, Russian sub suspected

Sweden’s royal navy deployed hundreds of troops and vessels Monday in a search for “suspected foreign activity underwater” after reportedly intercepting a Russian-language distress signal coming from a submerged craft in Stockholm’s archipelago.

The intensive hunt for a suspected Russian submarine in Swedish territorial waters reflected the mounting tension between Russia and its Baltic neighbors as a consequence of the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine and seizure of the Crimean peninsula earlier this year.

Stockholm authorities also protested to Moscow last month after its national airspace was penetrated by two Russian fighter jets. Finland, which shares a more than 800-mile border with Russia, last week complained of a Russian naval ship interfering with a Finnish research vessel in international waters. And in September, Canada claimed its ships taking part in Black Sea naval exercises with Ukraine were buzzed by Russian aircraft.

Rear Adm. Anders Grenstad of the Royal Swedish Navy told journalists in Stockholm Monday that the maritime search had been launched to locate the suspected presence of a foreign undersea vessel in national waters.

“It could be a submarine, it could be a diver using a moped-like underwater vehicle and it could be divers that don’t have any business on our territory – that’s the range of foreign underwater activity we are looking into,” the Euronews agency quoted Grenstad as saying.

Svenska Dagensblat newspaper, however, quoted unnamed sources with knowledge of the search, said to be the biggest in the post-Cold War period, as saying the hunt was triggered Friday after Swedish military intercepted a Russian-language radio distress call from somewhere in the Stockholm archipelago to a receiver in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, main base of Moscow’s Baltic Sea fleet.

The newspaper quoted sources as saying the communication transmitted over an emergency frequency used by the Russian military could be from a stricken Russian submarine seeking rescue from fleet headquarters.

Another Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, reported that it was told by intelligence expert Joakim von Braun that the object sought by the Swedish navy appeared to be an advanced Triton-NN mini-submarine. Von Braun also noted that Russian special forces are equipped with underwater survival gear and may have left the vessel to take refuge on one of the thousands of small islands in the Swedish archipelago to await rescue.

Soviet naval intrusions into Baltic neighbors’ territorial waters occurred frequently during the Cold War, triggering the most serious incident in 1981 when a damaged nuclear-armed submarine was stranded off of Sweden’s southeast coast for 11 days while Moscow and Stockholm negotiated its release.

Swedish military authorities late Sunday released a photograph taken by a passerby showing a vessel on the surface of the island-studded waters east of the capital. The grainy photo released Sunday was reportedly taken about 30 miles east of Stockholm.