UK Only Article:
standard article
Issue:
The world’s biggest economic problem
Fly Title:
Sweden’s submarine hunt
Rubric:
The frustrating search for a suspected Russian submarine
TALK of a new cold war between Russia and Europe may be overdoing it, but the scenes being played out in Kanholmsfjarden, an area of water some 40 kilometres (25 miles) east of Stockholm, are vividly reminiscent of a drama from an earlier era. In 1981 a Soviet Whiskey-class submarine, U137, ran aground near Karlskrona, a Swedish naval base. The incident, regarded as a flagrant breach of the country’s neutrality, became known as “Whiskey on the rocks”. It was far from a one-off: Soviet submarines carried out operations in Swedish waters throughout the cold war, reaching a peak of aggression in the 1980s.
History may be repeating itself. On October 17th Sweden’s armed-forces command reported that, following a visual observation by a “credible source”, it was investigating probable “foreign underwater activity”. The following day, as the navy stepped up the search by deploying additional ...
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