An investigation and an extraordinary meeting
Finnish police said on Thursday they were investigating whether a foreign ship had caused damage to an undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia after a sudden outage on Wednesday.
For its part, the Estonian government held an extraordinary meeting on Thursday to determine the circumstances of the malfunction that affected a power cable in the Baltic Sea transmitting electricity from Finland.
Estonian prime minister Kristin Michal, via the X platform, said that “despite the holidays, many people in Estonia and Finland have been working over the past two days to find out the causes of the problem behind the interruption of the Eastlink 2 Cable,” adding: “We are in close contact with our colleagues in the Nordic and Baltic countries.
Imposing an alert
The Baltic states have been on alert for possible sabotage following a series of outages of power cables, communication lines and gas pipelines since 2022.
It should also be noted that the equipment located under the sea is prone to technical malfunctions and accidents, as reported by the agency “Reuters”.
Single cable
Fingrid, the operator of the Electricity Networks, said that the power cable “estlink 2”, which has a capacity of 658 megawatts, is still out of service since the outage that began at midday local time, on Wednesday, so that the cable “estlink 1” with a capacity of 358 megawatts remains the only one in service between the two countries.
The Finnish police said in a statement that “the police, in cooperation with the border guards and other authorities, are investigating the sequence of events that led to the incident”.
Police said investigators were looking into the possible role a foreign vessel may have played, without naming the vessel.
Meanwhile, police in Sweden are leading an investigation related to the failure of two communication cables in the Baltic Sea last month, in an incident that German defense minister Boris Pistorius said he believed was caused by sabotage.
Helsinki / Castle Journal
