HELSINKI — 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 governments 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 outage 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.
Police in Sweden are meanwhile leading an investigation into the breach last month of two Baltic Sea telecom cables, in an incident German Defense 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. — Reuters
Be the first to comment