Swedish military studying video appearing to show sunken vessel but confusion reigns over whether it is a recent model or one that sank as long ago as 1916

The Swedish military is studying a video taken by shipwreck hunters who say it shows a wrecked submarine, just off the country’s eastern coast, which appears to be Russian.

Ocean X Team, the company behind the discovery, said on its website: “It is unclear how old the submarine is and for how long it has been at the bottom of the sea, but the Cyrillic letters on the hull indicate that it is Russian.”

According to Stefan Hogeborn, a diver from the Ocean X Team company that made the discovery, the vessel remained completely intact with no visible damage to the hull and the hatches closed.

“It is unclear how old the submarine is and how long it has been laying at the sea floor, but the Cyrillic letters on the hull indicate that it is Russian,” he said.

Hogeborn did not given the vessel’s location but according to Expressen tabloid, which published images of the wreck on its website, it was found about 1.5 nautical miles (2.8km) off the east coast of central Sweden.

Ocean X Team said the vessel was around 20 metres (66ft) long and 3.5 metres wide.

Sweden bathes in echoes of cold war drama as submarine hunt continues Read more

The discovery comes nine months after Swedish troops and ships unsuccessfully hunted for a Russian submarine said to have been near Stockholm, in the country’s biggest military mobilisation since the cold war.

Swedish armed forces spokesman Anders Kallin did not say whether the military also believed it was a Russian submarine. “We choose not to comment on it before we have seen more material,” he said. “We will continue the analysis together with the company in the coming days.”

“Our analysts have not yet presented their conclusions and want to see more images which the [diving] company will send to us,” he said, adding that the results were expected “in the coming days”. Kallin said the military would “not speculate”.

One of the men who discovered the submarine, Dennis Asberg, told the Expressen newspaper it looked modern. But one expert quoted by the paper said he believed it was actually a Russian “Catfish” submarine that sank in 1916.

Concerns over possible incursions by Russian submarines have increased as relations between Moscow and the west have worsened due to recent events in Ukraine. During the cold war, the navy repeatedly chased suspected Soviet submarines along its coast with depth charges.



In 1981, in an incident known as “Whiskey on the rocks,” a Soviet nuclear Whiskey-class submarine was stranded near a naval base deep inside Swedish waters after it ran aground, causing a diplomatic standoff.

There have been many false alarms. In 1995, then prime minister Ingvar Carlsson said the military on several occasions thought it had detected submarines only to find that the sounds being traced were made by mink, while in April this year the Finnish military used handheld underwater depth charges as a warning against what it suspected was a submarine in waters off Helsinki.