Undersea cable between Sweden and Estonia damaged by "external force or tampering" The Swedish government has said that damage to an undersea telecommunications cable between Sweden and Estonia earlier in October was caused by “external force or tampering”. “It has been confirmed that the cable has been damaged through external force or tampering,” Carl-Oskar Bohlin, minister for civil defence, said in a statement. Bohlin added that Estonia had assessed that “the damage to the gas pipeline and communications cable between Finland and Estonia is related to the damage to the communications cable between Sweden and Estonia”. On 8 October, a subsea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia were damaged, in what Finnish investigators believe may have been deliberate sabotage. Helsinki is investigating the pipeline incident, while Tallinn is probing the cable incident. Last week, Sweden said a third link had been damaged at roughly the same time as the other two. Nato has said it is stepping up patrols in the Baltic Sea after the incidents, which have stoked concerns about the security of energy supplies in the wider Nordic region. Closing summary Damage to a telecommunications cable between Sweden and Estonia earlier in October was caused by “external force or tampering”, the Swedish government said. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has submitted a bill for Sweden’s Nato membership bid to parliament for ratification, the Turkish presidency said. Turkey and Hungary are the only Nato members yet to ratify Sweden’s membership request. In its latest intelligence update, the UK’s Ministry of Defence said Russian government spending is becoming increasingly focused on the costs of its war on Ukraine. Three residents of Kherson oblast were arrested for allegedly helping Russian forces target locations for strikes in the city of Kherson, the regional prosecutor’s office announced on Monday, according to the Kyiv Independent. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said Vladimir Putin’s Russia “is the most heinous evil the world has witnessed since WWII” and that the Russian president and other “Russian perpetrators must face justice for their crimes”. Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Monday refused to leave his cell and skipped a court hearing, protesting after prison officials took away all of his writing supplies, his allies said. The Associated Press reports: Navalny, who is serving a 19-year prison term, was due to participate in a court hearing via video link on Monday on one of many lawsuits he had filed against his prison. His ally Ivan Zhdanov said the politician refused to leave his cell after prison officials took away all of his writing supplies. After that “security operatives in helmets entered the cell and, using force, dragged him to the investigator,” Zhdanov said, as the politician was also expected to attend unspecified “investigative procedures”. He didn’t clarify why Navalny’s supplies were taken away and didn’t say whether he was then returned to his cell. Russia’s independent news site Mediazona reported that after Navalny’s refusal to appear, the court hearing was adjourned until 2 November. Navalny has been president Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic, campaigning against official corruption and organising major anti-Kremlin protests. His 2021 arrest came after his return to Moscow from Germany where he recuperated from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. He has since been handed three prison terms, most recently on the charges of extremism, and spent months in isolation facilities in the prison over various minor infractions prison officials accused him of. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and a vast network of regional offices were outlawed that same year as extremist groups, a step that exposed anyone involved with them to prosecution. Navalny has previously rejected all the charges against him as politically motivated and accused the Kremlin of seeking to keep him behind bars for life. Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has welcomed Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s move to submit a bill approving Sweden’s bid to join the military alliance to parliament for ratification (see earlier post at 15.20). Stoltenberg added he was now looking forward to a “speedy vote” in the Turkish parliament, according to Reuters. The leader of the populist, rightwing Swiss People’s party (SVP) has promised more pragmatism and “less political correctness” after it won Sunday’s election with an improved vote share of 29%. Final results on Monday showed the SVP – whose anti-immigration campaign platform included a pledge to keep the country’s 8.7 million-strong population below 10 million – won 62 seats in the 200-seat parliament, nine more than it had before. Analysts said the vote was unlikely to change the formal makeup of the Swiss government, the federal council, whose seven cabinet posts are divided among the top four parties according to vote share, but marked a clear setback for liberals. While green themes dominated the 2019 election campaign, the return of immigration to the top of Europe’s political agenda allowed the SVP to focus on the theme that has helped it finish first in every national election since 1999. A 43% increase in asylum applications in the first half of 2023 and more than 65,000 refugees from Ukraine gave the nationalist party more ammunition, analysts said, which it deployed in a campaign that was widely criticised as xenophobic. Undersea cable between Sweden and Estonia damaged by "external force or tampering" The Swedish government has said that damage to an undersea telecommunications cable between Sweden and Estonia earlier in October was caused by “external force or tampering”. “It has been confirmed that the cable has been damaged through external force or tampering,” Carl-Oskar Bohlin, minister for civil defence, said in a statement. Bohlin added that Estonia had assessed that “the damage to the gas pipeline and communications cable between Finland and Estonia is related to the damage to the communications cable between Sweden and Estonia”. On 8 October, a subsea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia were damaged, in what Finnish investigators believe may have been deliberate sabotage. Helsinki is investigating the pipeline incident, while Tallinn is probing the cable incident. Last week, Sweden said a third link had been damaged at roughly the same time as the other two. Nato has said it is stepping up patrols in the Baltic Sea after the incidents, which have stoked concerns about the security of energy supplies in the wider Nordic region. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said he had a call with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, on ways to deepen Ukraine’s ties with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has said his country looks “forward to becoming a member of Nato” after Recep Tayyip Erdoğan submitted a protocol for Sweden’s admission into the alliance to Turkey’s parliament for ratification. He posted on X: Glad to hear that Turkish President Erdoğan has now handed over the ratification documents to the Turkish parliament. Now it remains for parliament to deal with the issue. Erdoğan submits Sweden"s Nato bid to parliament for ratification, says presidency Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has submitted a bill for Sweden’s Nato membership bid to parliament for ratification, the Turkish presidency said. The presidency did not provide further details. Sweden and Finland applied to join Nato last year after Russia invaded Ukraine. Finnish membership was sealed in April, marking a historic expansion of the western defence bloc, but Sweden’s bid has been held up by Turkey and Hungary. All 31 Nato allies must endorse Sweden’s membership. Turkey has previously said Sweden must take more steps at home to clamp down on the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), which the EU and US also deem a terrorist group. A lioness rescued from a zoo in Ukraine could be rehomed in the UK with her cubs. BBC News reports: The female lion, named Aysa, was pregnant when she was abandoned at a private zoo in the Donetsk region at the start of Russia’s invasion. She was moved to another facility in Ukraine, where she gave birth to cubs Teddi, Emi and Santa. Yorkshire Wildlife Park said it was working to get permission to move the lions to the UK before Christmas. All four are currently at Poznan Zoo in Poland, where they have been temporarily rehomed. Spain has seized ancient gold artefacts valued at 60 million euros (£52.3m) stolen from Ukraine after thieves were caught trying to sell them in Madrid, Spanish police said on Monday. According to Reuters, the 11 pieces, primarily jewellery including intricate necklaces, bracelets and earrings, are dated from the Greco-Scythian period between the 8th and 4th centuries BC, the police said. The items were exhibited in a Kyiv museum between 2009 and 2013, and were smuggled out of Ukraine in 2016, Madrid National Police said in a statement, without identifying the museum. The artefacts had forged documents to make it look as if they belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, police said. Three Spanish and two Ukrainian nationals were arrested as part of the investigation, which began in 2021, after one of the pieces – a gold belt with rams’ heads – was sold in a private sale in Madrid. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has arrived in Iran for talks with regional counterparts, the ministry of foreign affairs of Russia confirmed. Lavrov is expected to talk with foreign ministers from Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia, who have also been invited to the ministerial meeting of the consultative regional platform “3+3” for the South Caucasus. Russia’s ministry of foreign affairs posted a picture of Lavrov stepping off a place in Tehran on X, formerly known as Twitter. Russia plans significant increase in defence spending, says MoD In its latest intelligence update, the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said Russian government spending is becoming increasingly focused on the costs of its war on Ukraine. Consistently heightened military spending will highly likely contribute to inflationary pressures within Russia, the ministry said. Posting on X, formerly Twitter, the MoD wrote: The state’s proposed 2024 budget envisages an approximate 68% increase in planned defence spending compared to that allotted for 2023 – this puts defence spending for 2024 at around 6% of GDP. In contrast, education and healthcare spending will be frozen at the 2023 allocation, which amounts to a real term spending cut due to inflation. More spending will need to be allocated to fund payments and healthcare costs for the mounting numbers of wounded soldiers and the families of those killed in the conflict. More than half of those soldiers wounded severely enough to require longer term medical care have lost limbs, with one in five requiring upper limb amputations, deputy Labour minister Alexei Vovchenko stated on 17 October 2023. These injured soldiers will almost certainly require lifelong healthcare. Trade between Russia and India in the first eight months of 2023 more than doubled from the previous year, reaching a record high of almost $44bn, the Kyiv Independent cited Russian state-run media RIA Novosti as having reported. At least 361 Ukrainian athletes have been killed as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gyunduz Mamedov, a former deputy prosecutor-general of Ukraine, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. More than 3,000 athletes and coaches continued to fight in the Ukrainian air force, he wrote, adding that the death of the athletes was a “heavy loss for Ukraine and its future”. As prosecutors prepare a war crimes case, victims of alleged Russian torture in the Ukrainian city of Balakliia have relayed their horrifying experiences to the Guardian. Three Kherson residents arrested for allegedly "helping Russia target locations for strikes" Three residents of Kherson oblast were arrested for allegedly helping Russian forces target locations for strikes in the city of Kherson, the regional prosecutor’s office announced on Monday, according to the Kyiv Independent. Russia has focused on the industrial east since pulling back from a failed advance on Kyiv at the start of the February 2022 invasion and its forces have tried to maintain positions in Kherson since abandoning the region’s main town late last year. Russian forces are routinely reported to have shelled Kherson and villages on the western bank of the Dnipro from positions on the eastern bank, where they retreated late last year. We reported earlier that the Kremlin said any threats made against Russia were “unacceptable” after Latvia’s president said Nato should shut the Baltic Sea to shipping if Moscow were found responsible for damage to a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia. It came after Latvia’s president, Edgars Rinkevics, said in a TV interview last week that Nato should close the Baltic Sea to ships if Russia were proven responsible for the damage to the Balticconnector. Asked about Rinkevics’ remarks on Monday, Peskov told a regular news briefing: Any threats must be taken seriously, no matter who they come from. Any threats to the Russian Federation are unacceptable. I repeat once again: Russia has nothing to do with this (incident).