I'm John Batchel with Colonel Jeff McCausen, United States Army retired artillerymen, CBS News.

Through a headline in these last hours, Wall Street Journal.

Chinese ships crew suspected of deliberately dragging anchor for 100 miles to cut Baltic cables.

The subhead says that NATO warships have surrounded the offending suspect container ship.

We're looking at what appears to be an act of sabotage or hybrid warfare or accident, all are possible, but it's involving NATO nations,

Sweden, Finland, and the Baltics. There does not seem to be a hesitancy on some parts of NATO.

For example, the day after the incident was reported before we knew that it was a Russian

captain on a

Chinese vessel, the defense minister of Germany said, Russia did it. It's sabotage. Jeff,

this looks like hybrid warfare on NATO. In addition, you have another incident that is suspect.

Please remind me.

Yeah, John, there was also the 25th of November.

There was a cargo aircraft that crashed on landing in Lithuania.

That now is being investigated.

But the German foreign minister, Annalita Vedovac, has said that she believed this was a hybrid incident with outside involvement. Now, she didn't say anything beyond that, but the most likely candidate would be the Russian

intelligence services. So clearly, it appears that the Russians are doing that, taking that tactic

right now, in an effort to intimidate particularly European countries.

In addition to the countries you mentioned, John, I would say also intimidate the Germans.

The cables that she talked about actually connected Germany to Finland, Sweden, Norway, in the North.

And perhaps Mr. Putin is doing that as he witnesses the unraveling

at the moment of the German government. And there will be German elections in February. Mr.

Schultz says, Chancellor is doing very poorly. I think at this moment very unlikely he will, in fact,

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