Swedish Rear Admiral Anders Grenstad told the Swedish TT news agency on Saturday that what was thought to be a vessel or a foreign submarine was actually just a “workboat.”
The Swedish Navy changed the wording from “probable submarine” to “non-submarine” when referring to the reconnaissance mission connected to the unidentified vessel spotted in the Stockholm archipelago.
The massive hunt was used by the Swedish Defense Ministry to justify a six billion kronor ($696 million) hike in defense spending between 2016 and 2020.
The drama started after an amateur photograph of an alleged underwater vessel of unidentified origin was sent to the ministry. The man who took the photo raised the alarm because he thought he saw the object surface and disappear again.
Sweden undertook an intense one-week search in late October, looking for possible “foreign underwater activity” near Stockholm.
During the operation, the Swedish Navy reportedly used over 200 troops, helicopters, stealth ships and minesweepers to search the waters of the Baltic Sea...........http://on.rt.com/f3tuy3
13/4/15
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Moscow comments on Sweden's acknowledging "Russian submarine" hunt..... was vain...
ReplyDeleteRussia hopes the Swedish military and civil authorities will be soberer in assessing the security situation in the Baltic Sea region, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Monday.
The statement followed acknowledgement by a Swedish Navy spokesman that the "Russian submarine" Swedish media reported about in fall 2014 turned out to be a "technical vessel."
"The hunt for the Russian submarine, unprecedented in scale, thus turned out to be nothing more than a waste of money of Swedish taxpayers," the ministry said.
"It was apparently done for the sake of anti-Russian hysteria and to propagandize the myth of a ‘military threat’ from the East," it said.
tass.ru
14/4/15