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Sweden calls off hunt for submarine Sweden calls off hunt for submarine
(35 minutes later)
Swedish authorities have called off their week-long search for a suspected submarine in the Stockholm archipelago, saying the presumed intruder had probably escaped into the Baltic Sea. Sweden’s navy cancelled its week-long operation in the archipelago off Stockholm on Friday morning after finding no trace of the Russian submarine widely anticipated by military specialists and the media.
Naval and amphibious forces were ordered back to base, while some ground forces remained in the search area, military officials said. “Our assessment is that in the inner archipelago there was a plausible foreign underwater operation,” rear admiral Anders Grenstad said. “But we believe that what has violated Swedish waters has left.”
“We assess that the [vessel] that violated our waters has now left,” Rear Admiral Anders Grenstad said. Whatever was there could not have been a conventional submarine, Grenstad said, but a “craft of a lesser type”. It was not possible to state how big it was or to what country it belonged, he added. “The operation is substantially complete. The vessels and amphibious units have gone to port and resumed normal preparedness,” he said.
Sweden’s military launched its biggest anti-submarine operation since the twilight of the Soviet Union last Friday after receiving what it said were credible eyewitness reports of some type of underwater craft in the archipelago that extends from the capital, Stockholm, into the Baltic Sea. The hunt began last Friday after a member of the public contacted the armed forces with substantial and credible information. The public reported 250 sightings during the ensuing week, with the navy taking five of them seriously.
Grenstad said it was probably not a large submarine, but a smaller underwater craft that could navigate shallow waters in the archipelago. He didn’t rule out that there were more than one. Some reports given prominence in the media turned out to have innocent explanations, such as the “man in black” allegedly hunted by special intelligence who was revealed to be a pensioner fishing for sea trout. There was also a media focus on possible Russian “mother ships” in the Baltic that were linked to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Military officials haven’t blamed any country for the suspected intrusion, though most Swedish defence analysts say Russia would be a likely culprit. For seven days Sweden’s navy criss-crossed a vast expanse of water dotted with 30,000 islands, in what specialists likened to a search for a needle in a haystack.
Russia has suggested that the suspected intruder might be a Dutch submarine that participated in an exercise with the Swedish navy last week. The Dutch navy said that submarine had arrived in Estonia last Friday, when the Swedish military received reports of suspicious activity. Critics complained of a media circus surrounding the hunt, as several newspapers hired helicopters to follow the navy, whose specialist submarine-hunting helicopters were sold off in 2008. “In comparison with the newspapers’ reporting, Star Wars seems to be a social-realist documentary,” columnist Peter Kadhammar wrote in Aftonbladet, a popular tabloid.
“I don’t want to comment on what Russia says,” Grenstad said. “I have never singled out any nation. This is intelligence work to determine what is in our waters and what nationality it is.” Russia’s defence ministry consistently denied that one of its vessels was in Swedish waters, and dismissed the operation as a “tragicomedy”.
Sweden built up an anti-submarine force after a Soviet sub with nuclear weapons ran aground off its southern shores in 1981 but started dismantling the force as part of deep cuts in defence spending after the cold war ended. Anti-submarine helicopters were phased out in 2008 and replacements are not expected until 2018. The fevered atmosphere of the past week evoked strong echoes of the cold war fears that gripped the country after a Russian nuclear-armed submarine became grounded on rocks in southern Sweden in 1981. For more than a decade the navy conducted frequent searches of Swedish waters, sometimes dropping depth charges on suspect objects. But no Russian submarine was identified.
Apart from cutting defence spending, Sweden has shifted its focus from territorial defence to international peacekeeping operations and abolished conscription. In 2012 Sweden had 20,000 troops on active duty and 200,000 reserves, down from 50,000 active-duty personnel and almost 600,000 reserves in 1999, according to statistics from the UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. This week’s naval operation cost about SEK20m (£1.7m), or about the same sum that was spent on fighting forest fires in Sweden over the summer, Grenstad said.
Sweden elected a minority “red-green” government in September, which has faced pressure on defence spending after Russian incursions into the country’s airspace and heightened fears about Sweden’s defence capabilities in the worst crisis in east-west relations for a generation.
Before the submarine hunt, the government had agreed to implement the recommendations of a cross-party parliamentary committee to increase defence spending and proceed with the SEK900m purchase of 10 fighter aircraft and a submarine.
Announcing its first budget on Thursday, the new government confirmed the additional SEK300m each year for the next five years, but the centre-right opposition claimed it amounted to a real-terms cut.
A conspiracy theory that the submarine scare was manufactured to strengthen the navy’s case for greater finance was widely discussed on social media. “The timing is almost too good to be true,” according to Aftonbladet.