The incident was subsequently reported to the Armed Forces, and the hard drive of the computer in question was collected by the police. Their conclusions were classified, but according to the book, the incident was classed as an undetermined alien submarine.While writing his book, Nils Ove Jansson took a closer look at the case and managed to get the hard drive analyzed again. There, a new image was found, with original measurement data that made it possible to calculate the object’s true length, width and height. This spurred Jansson to conclude that it was a “Russian diving vessel of the Triton NN type,” which “visited Gavle harbor on June 29 between 11 am and 1 pm.” In the words of Nils Ove Jansson, the incident must be classified as a “gross violation.”The Swedish Armed Forces responded that they have taken the observation of a suspected violation seriously and investigated it. However, the conclusions are being kept confidential.This “revelation” touted by Swedish media, echoes the protracted and painfully unsuccessful hunt for a “Russian submarine” conducted in the Stockholm archipelago in 2014, when the Swedish Navy mobilized amid a media panic, when grainy footage of emerging “submarines” were published. Several years later, a subsequent investigation established that the “enemy submarine” appeared to be a faulty weather buoy belonging to Sweden’s own Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) and gathered data for the armed forces as well.The costly yet fruitless Operation Eagle was unleashed in the fall of 2014, when then-Supeme Commander Sverker Goransson claimed that a “smaller submarine” had “violated Swedish waters.”The top brass and the Swedish government were reportedly informed of the mistake in May 2015. The news reached the parliament in another four months. However, the Swedish military still claimed publicly that a violation had occurred “beyond all reasonable doubt.” It took another four years for the information to reach the public.In the meantime, this error was milked to secure new allotments of billions of kronor in defense spending and extra resources for submarine hunting. In 2015, the Swedish state decided to buy two new A26 submarines from Saab and perform a half-time upgrade of two Gotland-class submarines, also to the tune of billions.
World’Frying Russians in Butter’: Major Swedish Daily Under Fire for Spreading Hate Speech31 January, 06:38 GMTOver the decades, the fears of Russian covert operations or a downright invasion have been used frequently for political or economic gain. Stoking up anti-Russian sentiment in Sweden is a historic tradition dating back centuries; even in the 16th century, Swedish kings saw Russia as an “inherited nemesis.” Starting from the late medieval era, Sweden has fought more than 30 wars against Russia, over today’s Finland, the Karelian isthmus, the Gulf of Finland and the broader Baltic Sea region. Following the initial tug of war, with both sides gaining and ceding territory, Russia emerged victorious from the Great Northern War (1700 to 1721), quashing Sweden’s aspirations to supremacy once and for all.The string of bitter military losses, culminating in the Finnish war (1808-09) when the Russian forces embarked upon their unprecedented march across the frozen Gulf of Bothnia and caught the Swedish homeland unawares, left a deep mark on Sweden, cementing the irrational “threat from the East” in the national psyche.