COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – A Russian telecoms cable in the Baltic Sea suffered an outage last month and is now undergoing repairs by Russia, the Finnish economy ministry said on Monday, adding to a spate of damage to the region’s subsea infrastructure.
The 1,000 kilometre (620 miles) Baltika cable belonging to state-owned Rostelecom runs from the region of St. Petersburg to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad in the southern Baltic Sea.
A gas pipeline linking Finland and Estonia and two other telecoms cables, connecting Estonia to Finland and Sweden, were also damaged last month.
The Finnish ministry declined to comment on whether the Baltika incident was in any way linked to the earlier outages.
Finnish police believe damage to the Balticconnector gas pipeline was caused by a Chinese container ship dragging its anchor along the seabed but have not concluded whether this was an accident or a deliberate act.
Rostelecom first reported the outage of its telecoms cable to Finnish authorities on Oct. 12, the economy ministry said on Monday, four days after the damage to the gas pipeline and the two other cables was first discovered.
The Finnish border guard said on Monday it was monitoring a Russian salvage ship, the Spasatel Karev, that was undertaking repairs to the Baltika cable in Finland’s economic zone.
In September 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines connecting Germany and Russia in the Baltic Sea were damaged by explosions that authorities have said were deliberate acts of sabotage.
(Reporting by Louise Breusch Rasmussen, editing by Terje Solsvik)
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