I’ve just posted a long-form article for paid subscribers, you can read it here:
But I didn’t want to leave my free subscribers hanging, so check out this video on the formation of Sweden’s newest spy agency to counter Russia. If you’re not into video, click on the transcript button to read it instead… But then you’ll miss me in a tux; a truly rare occurrence in the wild.
Sweden just confirmed it’s building a brand-new foreign intelligence agency modeled directly on Britain’s MI6, putting the final nail in the coffin of neutrality. The trigger sits on the seafloor: a sustained pattern of undersea cable sabotage across the Baltic, tied to Russia’s shadow fleet, that Sweden’s fragmented intelligence structure was never built to piece together.
I cover how the new agency, UND, will work, why NATO membership made the old setup untenable, and what’s still genuinely uncertain about the timeline.
Слава Україні!
EDIT: Transcript button is being funky, so here’s my script pasted in from word:
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Since 2022, undersea cables connecting Sweden to Latvia, Finland to Estonia, and Sweden to Lithuania have all been damaged, in incidents that keep involving the same category of vessel: aging tankers and cargo ships tied to Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, dragging anchors across exactly the infrastructure that keeps Nordic countries talking to each other.
None of the individual investigations has definitively proven Russian state involvement. That’s exactly the point. Sweden’s own official review concluded its military intelligence service failed to predict Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, despite visible signs of a military buildup beforehand. Now the country that spent 200 years staying deliberately neutral, refusing to join alliances, refusing to run a foreign spy service of its own, just announced it’s building one from scratch.
Sweden is creating a new foreign intelligence agency. Officials are comparing it directly to Britain’s MI6. And the timing isn’t subtle. This is a country that watched cables get cut in its own territorial waters, watched its own intelligence services miss a war they should have seen coming, and decided the fix wasn’t better weapons.
It was better eyes.
If Britain has MI6, America has the CIA, and Russia has a collection of men falling out of windows, Sweden now wants a dedicated foreign intelligence service of its own.
Hey friends, Wes here. Defense journalist, law grad, Army and Air Force veteran. If you’re new here, welcome to my channel and if you’re not, welcome back, you are looking amazing today, I hope somebody has told you that. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it because it’s working.
Sweden is building its own MI6. So let’s talk about why a neutral country for two centuries just decided espionage is now a national priority. Bond had an Aston Martin. Sweden has Saab. Personally, I’d take the Gripen.
Most people think of intelligence agencies as something countries either have or don’t, fixed institutions that exist quietly in the background regardless of the geopolitical weather. That’s not actually true for Sweden. Sweden has spent two centuries deliberately avoiding exactly this kind of institution, precisely because neutrality meant staying out of the alliance structures and intelligence-sharing arrangements that make a foreign spy service actually useful.
Neutrality is gone. Sweden joined NATO in 2024. And once you’re inside an alliance, staying without a foreign intelligence service isn’t caution anymore. It’s a liability, because every ally around you is sharing a level of intelligence product Sweden currently has no dedicated agency built to produce, receive, or reciprocate.
Let’s be clear about the mechanics, because this is a real institutional shift.
Sweden’s government confirmed on May 5th, 2026, that it’s moving forward with a new civilian foreign intelligence agency, officially called Sweden’s foreign intelligence service, abbreviated UND, set to begin operations at the start of 2027. Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard announced the plan, explicitly framing it as a rethink prompted directly by the war in Ukraine: “During the ongoing war in Ukraine, it has become very clear that an information advantage and the ability to rapidly and continuously adapt various technical systems are just as crucial as advanced weapons systems.” She compared the new service directly to the UK’s MI6.
Sweden currently runs three separate agencies handling pieces of this mission. MUST, the Military Intelligence and Security Service, covers foreign military threats. SAPO, the Swedish Security Service, handles domestic threats and sits within the police structure. FRA, the National Defense Radio Establishment, runs signals intelligence. UND will absorb some of MUST’s current responsibilities while working closely alongside all three, reporting directly to the government as a distinct civilian foreign intelligence body, comparable in structure to how the CIA or MI6 sit outside their countries’ military chains of command.
The cost is roughly 2.8 billion Swedish kronor, about $302 million, with resources primarily transferred from the existing armed forces budget rather than new spending layered on top.
If Sweden’s new foreign spy agency is watching Russia, I hope they budget extra storage. Russian incompetence generates a lot of footage.
Wait, why did Sweden never have a foreign spy agency?
Sweden maintained military non-alignment for roughly two centuries, a policy that shaped nearly every institution in the country’s security architecture. Non-aligned countries generally don’t build dedicated foreign human intelligence services in the mold of MI6 or the CIA, because that kind of service is built specifically to support alliance-level military planning, coordinated foreign policy, and the kind of intelligence-sharing relationships neutral countries deliberately avoid entangling themselves in. Sweden’s existing structure, military intelligence covering foreign military threats, domestic security handled through the police, and signals intelligence running separately, reflected exactly that posture. Watch, but don’t fully commit.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 broke that calculus immediately. Sweden applied for NATO membership within months and formally joined the alliance in 2024. Stenergard was explicit about what that membership actually demands: “We also have new expectations of ourselves as a NATO ally, and as we now develop our intelligence structure, we will also better match the structures that exist within NATO and among our allies.”
That’s a direct admission. Sweden’s old intelligence architecture was built for neutrality. NATO membership requires a different one, and Sweden is now building it specifically to match what its allies already run.
This isn’t purely a forward-looking modernization project. It’s also an admission of a specific failure. Like many Western intelligence services, Sweden’s Military Intelligence and Security Service did not foresee the scale of Russia’s 2022 invasion, despite visible indicators of a major military buildup beforehand. That miss triggered an official government review and real political criticism, and the proposal for a dedicated foreign intelligence agency emerged directly from that review process, receiving initial government approval before this month’s formal announcement to proceed.
That sequence matters. Sweden isn’t building UND because Brussels asked nicely or because NATO membership comes with a mandatory checklist. It’s building UND because Swedish officials looked directly at their own intelligence failure around the most consequential European security event in decades, and concluded the existing structure, split across three separate agencies with different mandates and different chains of command, wasn’t producing the kind of coordinated foreign intelligence picture a NATO ally actually needs.
Now let’s connect this decision to what’s actually been happening in Nordic and Baltic waters, because the timing lines up perfectly.
Since Russia’s invasion began, Nordic and Baltic security services have documented a sustained pattern of incidents involving undersea infrastructure. In December 2024, Finland seized a Russian-linked oil tanker after suspected sabotage of an undersea fiber-optic cable, part of what Finnish investigators later said was a crew poised to cut additional cables when caught. That same period saw the Eagle S, flagged in the Cook Islands, drag its anchor and cut the Estlink-2 cable in the Gulf of Finland. The Chinese-flagged Yi Peng 3 is suspected of deliberately dragging its anchor to sever both the C-Lion1 cable connecting Finland and Germany and the Arelion cable linking Sweden and Lithuania.
Four additional incidents followed in late 2024 and early 2025, three of them near Sweden’s strategically significant island of Gotland, affecting telecommunications, power, and gas connections running between Nordic countries, the Baltic states, and Germany. On January 26th, 2025, Swedish coast guard vessels boarded a Bulgarian-flagged ship on suspicion of anchor dragging and cable sabotage, triggering NATO to deploy patrol ships under a mission specifically created for this pattern, called Baltic Sentry. A 2025 cyberattack on a heating plant in western Sweden was formally attributed by Swedish officials to a pro-Russian group with links to Russian security and intelligence services, a case Swedish authorities directly compared to a December 2025 cyberattack against Poland’s power grid.
None of these individual incidents has been definitively proven as a direct Kremlin order. That’s consistently true across nearly all of them, and it’s not an accident. It’s the entire operating logic of the campaign: deniable vessels, ambiguous flags, damage that could plausibly be accidental anchor dragging, repeated often enough and across enough infrastructure that the cumulative pattern becomes unmistakable even when each individual case stays legally unresolved.
A broader assessment counted more than 150 incidents of sabotage, cyberattacks, and influence operations linked to Russia across Europe since 2022, run primarily through the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence directorate. Norway’s own Police Security Service has documented similar patterns in its national threat assessments, and a joint 2023 investigation by Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish broadcasters tracked Russian naval intelligence vessels, including one called the Admiral Vladimirsky, operating near Swedish training areas and wind farm infrastructure.
Look, in the military, patterns are everything.
One aircraft on an unusual heading could be weather, could be a navigation error, could be nothing. Ten aircraft on the same unusual heading across six months, near the same infrastructure, using the same evasive profile when challenged, stops being noise and becomes signal. That’s exactly the analytical discipline this undersea cable pattern requires, and it’s exactly what a fragmented intelligence structure struggles to produce.
When foreign military threats sit with one agency, domestic security sits with another, and signals intelligence sits with a third, connecting a Bulgarian-flagged tanker’s anchor drag near Gotland to a cyberattack on a Swedish heating plant six months later to a Russian naval intelligence vessel spotted near a wind farm the previous year requires those three agencies to actually talk to each other, consistently, in real time. A dedicated foreign intelligence service, built specifically to fuse exactly that kind of scattered evidence into one coherent picture, is the institutional fix for exactly the gap Sweden’s own 2022 failure exposed.
Here’s what’s uncertain about this announcement.
The legislation still has to clear Sweden’s Council on Legislation, the body that formally scrutinizes draft laws, before heading to parliament, originally targeted for June 2026. Standing up a functioning foreign intelligence service from nothing, recruiting case officers, building overseas infrastructure, establishing the kind of trusted liaison relationships with allied services that actually produce usable intelligence, takes considerably longer than the January 2027 operational start date might suggest to a casual reader. MI6 and the CIA took decades to build the institutional relationships and tradecraft that make them really effective. Sweden is compressing a process that historically unfolds over generations into a matter of months on paper.
Also, the 2.8 billion kronor budget is coming primarily from the existing armed forces budget, not new spending layered on top. That’s a real tradeoff, not a free upgrade, and it means UND’s creation is drawing resources away from other defense priorities at exactly the moment Sweden is also trying to scale up conventional military spending as a new NATO member facing the same Russian threat this agency is meant to help counter.
None of that undermines the logic behind the decision. It means the gap between announcing an MI6-equivalent and actually operating like one will likely take years to close, even after January 2027 arrives on the calendar.
So, Russia’s hybrid campaign against Nordic and Baltic infrastructure has succeeded because it operates in the gap between clearly military and clearly civilian, between obviously deliberate and plausibly accidental, between a single incident that means nothing and a pattern across years that means everything. Sweden’s old intelligence architecture, split across military, domestic, and signals agencies with different mandates, was structurally well-suited to a world of clear threats and clear categories. It was poorly suited to a world where a tanker’s anchor drag, a power plant cyberattack, and a naval intelligence vessel near a wind farm are actually three data points in the same campaign.
Sweden isn’t building UND because espionage suddenly became fashionable. It’s building UND because two centuries of deliberately staying outside alliance intelligence structures left the country structurally unequipped for exactly the kind of deniable, distributed, pattern-based threat Russia has been running against it since 2022. NATO membership didn’t just add Sweden to a defense pact. It exposed how much of Sweden’s intelligence architecture still belonged to the neutrality era.
UND doesn’t yet exist as an operating institution, and the January 2027 target remains a plan rather than a completed transition. Building genuine tradecraft, overseas networks, and the kind of trusted liaison relationships that make a foreign intelligence service actually effective is a multi-year process at minimum, regardless of how quickly the legislation moves through parliament. And Russia’s sabotage campaign has continued evolving specifically to stay ambiguous enough to avoid clean attribution, which means even a fully staffed and operational UND will likely face the same evidentiary challenges that have made most of the undersea cable incidents legally unresolved so far.
Sweden spent two centuries deciding that staying out of everyone else’s intelligence business was the safest possible position. Neutral. Watchful. Uncommitted.
Then a Bulgarian-flagged tanker dragged its anchor across a cable near Gotland, a heating plant in western Sweden got hit by a group with Russian intelligence links, and Sweden’s own military intelligence service admitted it hadn’t seen 2022 coming despite the warning signs sitting in plain view. Two hundred years of careful neutrality couldn’t survive contact with a war being fought partly on the seafloor and partly in cyberspace, using tools specifically designed to never quite cross the line into something a country could point at and call an act of war.
So Sweden is building MI6. In a tuxedo, metaphorically speaking, if not literally, the country that spent two centuries avoiding this exact kind of institution just decided it’s finally ready to dress the part.
If you found this useful, here’s the one thing that actually matters most: hitting subscribe. That’s the single strongest signal I can get that stories like this one, the quiet institutional shifts that don’t trend but actually reshape how a country defends itself, are worth making more of.
Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, Crimea is Ukraine.
