My personal opinion so far is that this whole thing is teetering between media frenzy and actual issue.
Edit: Have to correct myself. Googling now it seems all traces of this statement have been scrubbed, and instead I find that the International Cable Protection Committe (ICPC) claim about 200 cable issues a year WORLD WIDE.
So maybe the Finnish security police had misspoken and have now retracted this statement from all media.
Either way, I have worked with internet since 2004 and I remember as early as 2004 dealing with companies in Sweden who had boats and other equipment just to install and maintain cables across the baltic and atlantic. It's something that requires non-stop maintenance, regardless of the security situation in the world.
One also has to ask if it's productive to cut these cables when 1) it disrupts nothing on a grand scale, and 2) if it were to disrupt anything it also means they cannot perform other attacks.
Welcome to hybrid warfare! This is the point.
Part of a balanced DoS.
The article is about cables but Russia has also been jamming satellite beams and shelling ground stations since the start of the Ukraine conflict, and they (IIRC) even developed a missile with a nuclear payload to take out satellites kinetically.
I'm Swedish, if that matters, and recall reading about (accidental) cable breakages all the way back to at least 2010 sometime. As mentioned elsewhere, there are between 100-200 cable breakages annually
> Do cables break?
> Yes! Cable faults are common. On average, there are over 100 each year.
> Unintentional damage from fishing vessels and ships dragging anchors account for two-thirds of all cable faults.
https://blog.telegeography.com/what-happens-when-submarine-c...
It seems like the media have ramped up reporting on cable breaks, because of the context, but seemingly none of them have been confirmed to be intentional, at least as far as I know. But I agree that it seems highly suspicious, also the recent water-supply sabotage on Gotland seems related to this all (https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/Vz2em4/misstankt-sabota...)
World wide. A bit different from Baltic Sea only.
You should rather wonder why do you hear so much of it now.
For instance, from https://www.iscpc.org/publications/ you can find https://www.iscpc.org/documents/?id=138 which has statistics over the years by source of damage (spoiler: no russian spy nor UFOs)