On the morning of Sunday, Nov. 17, an undersea cable connecting Sweden and Lithuania suddenly stopped working. Less than 24 hours later, the only cable connecting Finland and central Europe had been cut, too. Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said on Nov. 19 that the incidents were “probably sabotage.”

Indeed, this was not the first case of suspected sabotage in the Baltic Sea, with the evidence so far pointing to a Chinese merchant vessel with a Russian captain. But while Western governments may be able to identify culprits, avenging the acts is much harder than it seems.

On the morning of Sunday, Nov. 17, an undersea cable connecting Sweden and Lithuania suddenly stopped working. Less than 24 hours later, the only cable connecting Finland and central Europe had been cut, too. Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said on Nov. 19 that the incidents were “probably sabotage.”

Indeed, this was not the first case of suspected sabotage in the Baltic Sea, with the evidence so far pointing to a Chinese merchant vessel with a Russian captain. But while Western governments may be able to identify culprits, avenging the acts is much harder than it seems.

“The cable was cut on Sunday morning, at around 10. The systems immediately reported that we had lost the connection. Further investigation and clarification took place, and it turned out that it was damaged,” Andrius Semeskevicius, the chief technology officer at Telia Lietuva (the Lithuanian arm of the Swedish telecoms giant Telia), told Lithuanian public television on Monday evening.

By then, it was clear that the damage to the communications cable, which connects Lithuania with the strategically vital Swedish Baltic Sea island of Gotland, wasn’t the result of natural ocean movements or even sloppy seafarers or fishers. By the time that Semeskevicius spoke with Lithuanian television, another undersea cable in the Baltic Sea had also been mauled.

The second cable is even more important than the Swedish-Lithuanian one. The C-Lion1, which connects Finland with Germany via the southern tip of Sweden’s Baltic Sea island of Oland, is the only cable providing this connection. (C-Lion1 is owned by the Finnish state-owned firm Cinia Oy.)

At one point, the two cables intersect. And in the early hours of Nov. 18, someone had arrived at the intersection point with apparent intent to harm.

“Here we can see that the cables cross in an area of only 10 square meters—they intersect,” Semeskevicius told Lithuanian television. “Since both are damaged, it is clear that this was not an accidental dropping of one of the ship’s anchors,........

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