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December 27, 2024 | 11:29 am
TEMPO.CO, Helsinki - Finnish authorities on Thursday 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.
The Cook Islands-registered ship, named by authorities as the Eagle S, was boarded by a Finnish Coast Guard crew that took command and sailed the vessel to Finnish waters, a Coast Guard official said at a press conference.
"From our side, we are investigating grave sabotage," said Robin Lardot, director of the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation.
"According to our understanding, an anchor of the vessel that is under investigation has caused the damage," he added.
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 aging tankers that seek to evade sanctions on the sale of Russian oil.
Two fiber-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 the Finnish group Cinia was also believed to have been severed, the agency said.
"We are coordinating closely with our allies and stand ready to support their investigations," said a spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council, adding that the incident underscored the need for closer international cooperation on safeguarding critical undersea infrastructure.
"We are following investigations by Estonia and Finland, and we stand ready to provide further support," NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in a post on social media X.
Both the Finnish and Estonian governments held 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 following 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.
The European Union said it strongly condemned any deliberate destruction of the continent's infrastructure.
"We commend the Finnish authorities for their swift action in boarding the suspected vessel," said a joint statement from EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas and the European Commission, the bloc's executive body.
Repairing the 170-km (106-mile) Estlink 2 interconnector will take months, and the outage raised the risk of a strained power supply during the winter, operator Fingrid said in a statement.
Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal said, however, that his country would continue to have sufficient access to electricity.
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 occurred.
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.
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