Russia 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.