Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said in 2023 that Sweden had gone into “battle-array for war on the Muslim world” by supporting “the criminal”, and that “all Islamic scholars agree that those who desecrate the Koran deserved the most severe punishment”.

Several undersea cables running under the surface of the Baltic Sea have been damaged in suspected sabotage incidents in recent months.

As tensions rise, NATO has launched Baltic Sentry 2025 to enhance security and resilience. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has emphasized the need for greater coordination in protecting critical infrastructure from sabotage.

For the first time since officially becoming a NATO member in March 2024, Sweden has taken a major step in its international military role. On January 18, 2025, Sweden deployed a mechanized battalion to Latvia,

Russia is "the main actor" in hybrid attacks on the alliance, said a senior NATO official following a spate of incidents.

The Nordic country has opened an investigation into the damage, just weeks after NATO stepped up its military presence in the area following a series of similar incidents.

Swedish authorities boarded a vessel suspected of being involved in an earlier underwater sabotage of cables in the Baltic Sea on Monday.

Sweden has opened a preliminary investigation into suspected aggravated “sabotage” and ordered the detention of a vessel in the Baltic Sea suspected of damaging an underwater fiber optic cable connecting Latvia and the Swedish island of Gotland earlier that day.

Swedish authorities have seized a ship over the “aggravated sabotage” of an undersea fibre-optic cable linking Latvia with a strategically important island in Sweden.

Russia and China have stepped up military activity in the Arctic, while NATO states in the region are reporting more acts of sabotage on energy and communications lines. President Donald Trump has recently revived U.

Mads Petersen, owner of Greenland-based startup Arctic Unmanned, sat in a car to keep warm while he tested a small drone at minus 43 degrees Celsius (minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit).