Finland police investigate role of foreign ship after power cable outage

Finnish police are investigating whether a foreign ship was involved in the damage of an undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia following a sudden outage on Wednesday, the police said on Thursday.

Both the Finnish and the Estonian government will hold extraordinary meetings later 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.

Repairing the 170 km (106 miles) Estlink 2 interconnector will take months, and the outage could cause a tense power supply situation during winter, operator Fingrid said in a statement.

Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal was in close contact with colleagues in the Nordic and Baltic region, he said in a post on X.

The 658 megawatt (MW) Estlink 2 power interconnector remains offline following the outage that began at midday local time on Wednesday, leaving only the 358 MW Estlink 1 in operation between the two countries, operator Fingrid said.

“The police, in cooperation with the Border Guard and other authorities, are investigating the chain of events of the incident,” Finnish police said in a statement.

Investigators were probing the potential role of a foreign ship, police said without naming the vessel.

This picture taken on October 12, 2015 shows the C-Lion1 submarine telecommunications cable being laid to the bottom of the Baltic Sea by cable laying ship “Ile de Brehat” off the shore of Helsinki, Finland. Germany and Finland said November 18, 2024 they were “deeply concerned” that an undersea telecommunications cable linking the countries had been severed and opened a probe, at a time of high tensions with Russia. “Our European security is not only under threat from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors,” the countries’ foreign ministers said in a joint statement.

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Police in Sweden are meanwhile leading an investigation into the breach last month of two Baltic Sea telecom cables, in an incident German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has said he assumed was caused by sabotage.

Separately, Finnish police continue to investigate damage caused last year to the Balticconnector gas pipeline linking Finland and Estonia, as well as several telecoms 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.