Finland Studies Cable Breach Causes as Sabotage Questioned-OxBig News Network

(Bloomberg) — Finland’s President Alexander Stubb said there’s no conclusion yet on whether recent repeated damage to undersea cables in the Baltic Sea was sabotage.

Speaking in an interview on Bloomberg TV from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Stubb said sabotage, a mistake or incompetence are still on the table as possible causes. Investigation is ongoing in Finland into the actions of the crew of shadow-fleet tanker Eagle S after its anchor pulled up four data cables and a power link from the seabed on Dec. 25.

“The bottom line is it doesn’t really matter who does it,” Stubb said on Wednesday. “The most important thing is that we are able to prevent it, and if we’re not able to prevent it, that we can actually correct it very quickly.”

Although probes are ongoing, the incidents are as of now looking likely to be accidents based on the evidence gathered so far, according to European government officials familiar with the matter.

The officials said there was currently insufficient evidence pointing to intentional sabotage. They explained that there was a significant number of vessels passing through an area packed with undersea infrastructure, and that many of the ships in Russia’s shadow fleet were badly equipped, in a dire state and should not be at sea.

The shadow fleet refers to a flotilla of tankers carrying sanctioned petroleum products from Russia, lacking Western insurance and operating under opaque conditions.

The officials also noted that in other cases, such as operations targeting freight transportation and other sites, investigators had been able to determine with confidence that Russian intelligence services were behind the attacks.

“The big problem we have now is that they’re basically transporting this sanctioned oil on ships that are not good — they’re old, they’re decrepit,” Stubb said. That’s increasing the risk of an environmental catastrophe, he said.

“You have to understand that the Baltic Sea is a small sea,” the president said, indicating that makes it more vulnerable to oil spills.

Stubb’s comments come just a week after he co-hosted policymakers from NATO countries surrounding the Baltic Sea to find ways to put a stop to breaches of underwater infrastructure. In conclusion, North Atlantic Treaty Organization members agreed to supply ships, surveillance aircraft and naval drones to help patrol the waters. 

“Now we have a Baltic Sentry operation in the Baltic Sea” and a better overview of the situation, Stubb said. 

Finland’s police has completed a forensic investigation on the anchor of the vessel that’s sailing under the Cook Islands flag after retrieving the metal hook from the seabed. 

The National Bureau of Investigation is still probing aggravated criminal mischief and aggravated interference of communications, indicating that it has not yet determined the events to have been accidental. The probe is set to take months, the police said.

“We do not jump into conclusions,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson told Bloomberg TV in an interview. “But we are also not being naive. We don’t think that suddenly things just start occurring in the Baltic sea that normally do not occur.”

“There is always a risk of bad seamanship but there are also limits to bad seamanship,” he said.

Finnish authorities already deemed Eagle S as not seaworthy after an inspection found 32 faults on the ship, three of them severe enough to mean it cannot operate until those are fixed.

The Washington Post and Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat have both previously reported that the latest cable breach is likely to have been an accident.

“Regardless of whether this intentional or unintentional, it’s simply unacceptable,” Kristersson said. “We cannot accept that important fiber or electricity cables are put at risk” because of vessels’ lack of respect for protecting them.

–With assistance from Alberto Nardelli, Chad Thomas and Jonas Ekblom.

(Updates with comments from Sweden’s prime minister from 14th paragraph)

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