Defence Team News | Removing explosive threats from the Baltic Sea
Video / July 16, 2026
Transcript
Spokespeople
LCdr Michael St-Pierre
Task Force Commander, OPEN SPIRIT 26
LCdr V. Zlotnikovs
Operation Commander, OPEN SPIRT 26
Latvian Navy
Master Sailor James Roocroft
Diver
Operation OPEN SPIRIT has been conducted for about 20 years, run by the Baltic nations. It rotates every year between Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and we're responding to historical ordnance - whether that's airdropped bombs or sea mines - and we operate together to search, find, classify, and destroy this ordnance within these waters.
According to the databases, there are more than 80,000 units of explosive ordnance still left in the Baltic Sea, and every year we do our best to get rid of as many objects as possible.
We're diving to depths of 36 meters and again, it's very dark down there, so we're not doing any looking with our eyes. We use a handheld sonar. The one that I found yesterday was, we believe, an aircraft dropped mine from the Second World War. You can't really tell from just how much it was degraded, but just through some open source research, the mine that I found when it was brand new had 700 kilograms roughly of explosives.
I've encountered Canadian teams before. They showed to be like a high professionals - really skilled in both AUV tasks and divers also showed very, very good performance.
Our European partners are some of the best at mine counter operations and we get to learn from them. But with that, we get to bring our assets, skills, and people to the table and offer our capabilities to the Alliance and to our Baltic partners to remove these threats from their waters.