Yesterday I published a brief text pointing out that not all submarines in the Baltic Sea are Russian, and that not all underwater activity is submarines. This will be a brief update on what has happened since.

The major news was when Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported that a signal emerging from the archipelago outside of Stockholm had been sent on a Russian Navy distress channel. When the search operation got underway, there was renewed traffic, which was encrypted, and a transmitter located in Russian Kaliningrad answered. This was the first evidence that decidedly pointed towards Russia as the country of origin. This could also explain the, in my opinion, rather strong and decisive response by the Swedish Navy when the first visual sightings occurred.

Representatives of the Swedish Defence Forces have denied that they have received knowledge about a distress signal, although the exact wording leaves the possibility open that A) the info has been distributed on a strict need-to-know basis, and as such is not available to the officers involved in the operation, or B) the interpretation that a signal on a known foreign military channel used for distress signals does not equal a known distress signal. They have also clearly stated that they do not know the country of origin or exact nature of the underwater activity, and as such they will continue to refer to it simply as “foreign underwater activity”. Most importantly, it has been confirmed that three visual sightings have taken place, and that the operation will continue for a number of days. Imagery from one of the sightings has also been released. The picture is grainy, but could be interpreted to show some kind of a midget submarine, e.g. the Russian Triton NN.

The question of where the mother ship is located has been focused on the Russian-owned Liberian-flagged crude carrier NS Concord. The ship has been anchored outside of St Petersburg since the beginning of May, acting as a floating storage. Last week, it set sail and sailed to a position right outside the border of Swedish territorial waters, where it has since loitered. To begin with its AIS-data gave the destination as Danish Straits, but today this was changed to Primorsk. When the tanker suddenly found itself in the limelight, the Russian research/sea survey vessel Professor Logachev suddenly headed out to sea, destined for Las Palmas(?). It remains to be seen if this vessel will make a stop outside of Stockholm, but the timing seems somewhat suspicious. The Logachev also happened(?) to be traveling in the middle of the three-ship Dutch naval flotilla heading home from Tallinn, with the Walrus-class submarine HNLMS Bruinvis probably not far away either.

In Finland Charly Salonius-Pasternak, Sr. Research Fellow at FIIA, noted that Finland’s stance on the issue will be noted in Sweden, and called for our politicians to make a clear statement in support of Sweden. Otherwise it will affect the possible deepening of Swedish-Finnish military co-operation.

This in turn made Carl Haglund (SFP/RKP), Minister of Defence, answer that we will wait and see, and that if the allegations are true, this is “very serious”. On a direction question he said that we are currently not planning any assistance to the Swedish Navy, but if an official call for help comes, he would personally view it favorably. With regards to what kind of help we could send, he stated that options remains open, and would depend on what kind of assistance the Swedish authorities would be asking for. Salonius-Pasternak in turn noted that one can offer help even before someone asks for it, but this remark went unanswered.

As a further note, the hashtag #redoctober has become widely used with regards to the incident.