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2 weeks ago
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Finnish authorities have seized a ship carrying Russian oil in the Baltic Sea on suspicion it caused the outage of an undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia a day earlier, and that it also damaged or broke four internet lines.
On Thursday, a Finnish coastguard crew boarded the Cook Islands-registered ship, named by authorities as the Eagle S. The crew took command and sailed the vessel to Finnish waters, a coastguard official told a press conference.
Robin Lardot, director of the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, said: “From our side we are investigating grave sabotage. According to our understanding, an anchor of the vessel that is under investigation has caused the damage.”
The Finnish customs service said it had seized the vessel’s cargo and that the Eagle S was believed to belong to Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of ageing tankers that seek to evade sanctions on the sale of Russian oil.
Two fibre-optic cables owned by Finnish operator Elisa linking Finland and Estonia were broken, while a third link between the two countries owned by China’s Citic was damaged, Finnish transport and communications agency Traficom said.
A fourth internet cable running between Finland and Germany and belonging to Finnish group Cinia was also believed to have been severed, the agency said.
Both the Finnish and the Estonian governments will hold extraordinary meetings on Thursday to assess the situation, they said in separate statements.
Baltic Sea nations are on high alert for potential acts of sabotage after a string of outages of power cables, telecom links and gas pipelines since 2022, although subsea equipment is also subject to technical malfunction and accidents.
Operator Fingrid said in a statement that repairing the 106-mile (170km) Estlink 2 interconnector would take months, and the outage raised the risk of power shortages during the winter.
The Eagle S Panamax oil tanker crossed the Estlink 2 electricity cable at 1026 GMT on Wednesday, a Reuters review of MarineTraffic ship tracking data showed, identical to the time when Fingrid said the power outage had occurred.
The ship was stationary near the Finnish coast on Thursday afternoon, with a Finnish patrol vessel stopped nearby, the data showed.
United Arab Emirates-based Caravella LLCFZ, which according to MarineTraffic data owns the Eagle S, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Peninsular Maritime, which, according to MarineTraffic acts as a technical manager for the ship, declined to comment outside of the company’s opening hours.
Margus Tsahkna, the Estonian foreign minister, said in a statement that damage to subsea installations in the Baltic Sea had become so frequent that it was difficult to believe this was caused merely by accident or poor seamanship.
He said: “We must understand that damage to submarine infrastructure has become more systematic and thus must be regarded as attacks against our vital structures.”
The 658-megawatt Estlink 2 outage began at midday local time on Wednesday, leaving only the 358MW Estlink 1 in operation between the two countries, operator Fingrid said.
On 16 December, 12 western countries said they had agreed upon measures to “disrupt and deter” Russia’s shadow fleet of vessels in order to prevent sanctions breaches and increase the cost to Moscow of the war in Ukraine.
On Thursday, Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president, said on X: “We must be able to prevent the risks posed by ships belonging to the Russian shadow fleet.”
Kęstutis Budrys, the Lithuanian foreign minister, said the growing number of Baltic Sea incidents should serve as a stark and urgent warning to Nato and the European Union to significantly enhance the protection of undersea infrastructure there.
Police in Sweden are leading an investigation into the breach last month of two Baltic Sea telecom cables, an incident the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, has said he assumed was caused by sabotage.
Separately, Finnish and Estonian police continue to investigate damage caused last year to the Balticconnector gas pipeline linking Finland and Estonia, as well as several telecom cables, and have said this was likely caused by a ship dragging its anchor.
In 2022 the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream gas pipelines running along the seabed in the same waters were blown up, in a case still under investigation by Germany.
