A Russian submarine recently discovered near the Swedish coast likely sank during World War I, the New York Times reports.
The diving team Ocean X found the small submarine at the end of July, raising fears that the sunken vessel was a recent Russian spying mission gone awry. But Swedish officials determined that the submarine was used during World War I, the Times reports:
This week, the Swedish authorities said they had solved the mystery: The vessel was an imperial submarine—nicknamed a Catfish—that had probably sunk after colliding with a Swedish vessel in 1916, during World War I.
The Swedish news media reported that the submarine had been part of the Imperial Russian Navy and that it had sunk with its crew of 18 in May 1916.
"We have seen the wreck and we can confirm that the vessel is from the czarist era and that it is a submarine that collided with another ship," Lubna El-Shanti, a spokeswoman for the Swedish Armed Forces, said on Wednesday by telephone from Stockholm. "It is a very old vessel. It is from before the time of the Soviet Union."
Sweden has been on high alert since reports last year of an incursion by a Russian submarine:
The discovery of the vessel comes at a time of tense East-West relations, with anxiety in the region fanned by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and by the conflict in Ukraine between government forces and pro-Russian rebels.
In October, the sighting of a mysterious vessel off the Stockholm archipelago led Sweden to undertake its largest mobilization since the end of the Cold War. The discovery, including unsubstantiated reports of a man in black wading near the craft, prompted speculation that a Russian spy had been sent to infiltrate the country. A month later, Swedish officials confirmed that its territorial waters had been violated by a foreign submarine. The Kremlin insisted that the vessel did not belong to Russia.