Baltic Military Shadow-boxing Said to Reach Cold War Levels
A daily game of Cold War cat-and-mouse is ratcheting up tensions in the Baltic and drawing the biggest military presence into the region for over 20 years, Swedish military officials say. Eye-to-eye encounters with Russian combat jets and reports of suspected submarines in Swedish and Finnish waters are fuelling regional concerns about Russian assertiveness in the wake of the Ukraine crisis and reversing years of defence cuts. Western officials say Russia has stepped up probing flights and mock bomb runs near Europe's borders since 2013, forcing jets from NATO nations and non-NATO allies like Sweden to scramble repeatedly. For its part, Moscow says NATO has dramatically increased reconnaissance flights near its borders.
Finland Fires at Suspected Foreign Submarine near Helsinki
A report by the AP said that the Finnish military says it has dropped depth charges onto a suspected submarine in the sea outside Helsinki after twice detecting the presence of a foreign object in the area. The navy's maritime operations chief, Olavi Jantunen, says they could not identify the "underwater object" but had begun an investigation, which could take weeks. “We strongly suspect that there has been underwater activity that does not belong there. Of course it is always serious if our territorial waters have been violated,” Defense minister Carl Haglund told Finnish news agency STT. A UPI reports quotes Navy chief of staff Admiral Juha Vauhkonen saying that it’s not yet possible to say whether or not the underwater object detected in waters near Helsinki was a submarine.
