New Delhi: A subsea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia, both NATO allies bordering Russia, under the Baltic Sea have been damaged in what the Finns suspect could be the outcome of a “deliberate … external act”.
With a 77-kilometre subsea section running across the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea, the Balticconnector connects Inkoo in Finland with Paldiski in Estonia. The Gulf of Finland is the easternmost arm of the Baltic Sea that stretches eastwards to Russian waters till the port of St. Petersburg. The pipeline can transport up to 7.2 million cubic metres of gas per day and was opened in December 2019 with a stated intention to integrate the markets of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland with more flexibility with supply.
The Balticconnector was shut early Sunday due to concerns of a leak. Gasgrid, the Finnish operator that oversees the operations of the pipeline along with Estonian operator Elering, announced that it would take months or more to repair the suspected leak.
Within hours of the suspected leak, Elisa — a Finnish telecommunications operator — also informed Finnish authorities of a fault detected in an undersea cable connecting Finland with Estonia.
According to a statement published by the office of the Finnish Prime Minister Tuesday, the leak in the Balticconnector lies within Helsinki’s economic zone.
“It is likely that the damage to both the gas pipeline and the data cable is caused by external activity. What specifically caused the damage is not yet known,” the President of Finland Sauli Niinistö said in a statement published Tuesday.
“The investigation will continue in cooperation between Finland and Estonia. We are also in constant contact with our allies and partners. I discussed with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg today. NATO is ready to assist with the investigation,” he added.
Balticconnector was Finland’s only fossil gas import channel since Russian imports were halted last May following the invasion of Ukraine.
On Tuesday, prices of gas in Europe reached a six-month high to EUR 49.75 a megawatt hour following the news as per media reports.
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Finland to probe ‘leak’
At around 2 AM Sunday, the Balticconnector recorded a sharp drop in pressure, from 34.5 bar to 12 bar and later to 6 bar, indicating that the contents had leaked into the Gulf of Finland, reported Reuters.
The pipeline was shut down. According to the statement issued by the Finnish Prime Minister’s office, Gasgrid, the Finnish operator, later informed the Finnish Border Guard that the damage was not caused by the normal “transmission process”.
The probe into the leak was then handed over to Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation. Head of the agency’s investigation department, Detective Inspector Timo Kilpelainen told reporters that “this act could not have been done by an ordinary person”.
About the telecommunications cable connecting Finland with Estonia that was also found damaged Sunday, the exact location of the damage has not yet been determined, but it is likely to be in Estonia’s exclusive economic zone, according to the office of the Finnish Prime Minister.
Helsinki also announced that damage to the cable did not impede critical communication networks and that “critical connections have been secured through several different arrangements”.
‘Dangerous precedents’: Kremlin
Dmitry Peskov, press secretary of the President of Russia called the damage to the gas pipeline as “disturbing”.
“I do not have technical information, I do not know if our special services have such information, but of course, this is quite disturbing news,” Peskov is reported to have said.
He added that a “dangerous precedent” had been seen in the Baltic Sea with the explosions that damaged the Nord Stream pipelines connecting Russia with Germany under the Baltic Sea and owned by Gazprom – Russia’s state-owned gas company — last September.
While Moscow blames the US and the UK for the explosions, there is no confirmation yet of who was responsible for sabotaging the Nord Stream I and II pipelines, which were rendered inoperable following the explosions.
“We know that dangerous precedents for carrying out terrorist attacks against critical infrastructure facilities in the Baltic have already been created, I mean the attacks against the Nord Stream pipelines,” Peskov said.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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