Finnish authorities said Thursday they were investigating an oil tanker that sailed from a Russian port over the suspected “sabotage” of a power cable linking Finland and Estonia.
On Christmas Day, the Estlink 2 submarine cable that carries electricity from Finland to Estonia was disconnected from the grid, just over a month after two telecommunications cables were severed in Swedish territorial waters in the Baltic Sea.
Robin Lardot of Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation said a probe for “aggravated sabotage” had been opened into the oil tanker Eagle S, which flies under the flag of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. “The assumption at the moment is that it is a shadow fleet vessel and the cargo was unleaded petrol loaded in a Russian port,” said Sami Rakshit, director general of Finnish Customs.
The shadow fleet refers to ships that transport Russian crude and oil products which are embargoed due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Eagle S was en route to Port Said in Egypt and still located in the Gulf of Finland, according to the tracking website Marine Traffic. It was escorted by a Finnish patrol ship toward the coast near Porkkala, around 30 kilometres (19 miles) west of Helsinki.
Police suspect that the oil tanker’s anchor might have damaged the power cable. “Our patrol vessel travelled to the area and could determine visually that the vessel’s anchor was missing,” Markku Hassinen of the Finnish Border Guard told a news conference. “So there is a clear reason to suspect something strange happened,” he said.
Finland’s Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said: “The decisive and determined action by our authorities… sends a strong message to other ships: We will intervene.” He did not specifically incriminate Russia, adding that the two countries had not yet had any contact over the incident. But Estonia’s Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said: “The damages to critical underwater infrastructure have become so frequent that it’s hard to believe they are accidents or just bad maritime manoeuvres.” Dragging an anchor on the seafloor can hardly be considered an accident, Tsahkna added in a statement, after talks with his Finnish counterpart on Thursday afternoon.
The EU threatened further sanctions against Russian vessels.
EU countries agreed earlier this month to blacklist around 50 more oil tankers from Russia’s “shadow fleet”, used to circumvent Western sanctions over the Ukraine war. The move was part of a 15th package of sanctions to be imposed by the 27-nation bloc since Moscow’s invasion.