MOSCOW, October 24. /TASS/. Utter nonsense — this is how Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the defense sector, described this week’s search for an alleged Russian submarine by Swedish forces, which was never found eventually.
“Sweden spent €2.2 million to track down an imaginary Russian submarine,” Rogozin tweeted on Friday. “One might think they are grownup people but still they are doing such an utter nonsense.”
Earlier on the same day, Swedish Armed Forces said they had wound up a week-long naval operation to establish “foreign underwater activity” in the area of the Stockholm Archipelago.
No definitive evidence of unauthorized presence of foreign submarines in Sweden’s territorial waters that could be demonstrated to the international community was found.
The operation to track down the submarine in the water area of Stockholm Archipelago was launched October 17, with Swedish media claiming that the probable subject of the search was a Russian submarine. Svenska Dagbladet daily surmised that the submarine might have sustained technology failure.
Russian Defense Ministry insisted from the first day of the operation no Russian submarine had entered the zone of the search.