FOOKUS ⟩ After the Balticconnector incident, Estonia buried half its head in the sand

Estonian naval personnel aboard the Kindral Kurvits examining the location of the breakage of the submarine cable with two sonars. Photo: Eesti Kaitsevägi

• Estonia's response to the Balticconnector incident was somewhat more muted than Finland's.
• The current Penal Code is more intended to restrain drunken seafarers than saboteurs.
• Readiness to board a vessel without the consent of the flag state should be demonstrated.

The Estlink 2 sabotage made Estonians nervous partly because the government that had reported to work during the holidays looked sluggish and hesitant in public communication. Estonia was much better prepared to respond this time, yet some necessary activities have been left on hold for too long on this side of the Gulf of Finland, editor Meelis Oidsalu writes.

The major storm of discontent that erupted at the government's December 26 press conference following the Estlink 2 sabotage was able to swell to such a size only against the backdrop of previous events.

Estlink 2 had been out of service for nine months from January 2024 due to a failure (which led to a 10 percent increase in electricity prices), while the case of the sabotage of the Balticconnector gas pipeline in October 2023 remains unresolved. The second part of Estonians' resentment was due to the perceived passivity of the Estonian government in comparison to the decisive behavior of the government of Finland.

Erkki Tori, director of coordination at the Government Office, said that on December 25, in addition to the Finnish ship, also a vessel of the Estonian Navy, Kindral Kurvits, was moving towards the Cook Islands-flagged oil tanker Eagle S, which had been dragging its anchor along the seabed for dozens of kilometers and broken the Estlink 2 cable.

According to Tori, both the Finnish and Estonian vessels were ready to contact the Eagle S to order it to head towards territorial waters. «Finland contacted the ship because the ship was in the Finnish economic zone,» he says, repeating the reasoning that had already been heard in the media earlier.

The oil tanker Eagle S, which on December 25, under the flag of the Cook Islands, sailed over the Estlink 2 cable, dragging its anchor along the seabed. – Image from the MarineTraffic website. Photo: Erik Prozes

Estonia, however, was sluggish in actions

For Alexander Lott, a researcher at the Norwegian Center for the Law of the Sea, Estonia's behavior before the Estlink 2 incident and after the Balticconnector incident seems more sluggish compared to that of the Finnish government. Although Finland is leading the investigation into the Balticconnector incident, Lott points out that the incident not only damaged infrastructure in the Finnish economic zone but also on the Estonian side, where cables between Sweden and Estonia, as well as Finland and Estonia, were broken. Therefore, it is altogether appropriate to compare the post-incident actions of these countries.

According to Lott, after the Balticconnector incident, the Finns were significantly better prepared not only technically but also politically. «While Estonia's defense minister still stated to the public broadcaster a year after the Balticconnector incident that interference with the freedom of navigation of a foreign-flagged ship sailing in the country's economic zone was essentially ruled out, Finland's defense minister took the position just a few weeks after the sabotage that the next ship suspected of attacking infrastructure would not be allowed to just leave the Finnish maritime area,» he says.

Part of the «reputational injury» was therefore caused by the state itself, as the minister of defense and the Navy had given the public signs of helplessness during the year following the sabotage of the Balticconnector.

The Cook Islands-flagged vessel Eagle S is suspected of breaking the Estlink 2 cable on Christmas Day. – Pictured: the Eagle S is static in the Finnish port of Porvoo. Photo: IMAGO/Jussi Nukari

Anyone who listened to the interview with Hanno Pevkur on the Vikerraadio morning program on December 27 could hear that he presented the Estlink 2 sabotage as a completely new situation. «Securing the connections, keeping the connections operational is in fact a responsibility of the owners of the connections,» the Reform Party minister said in response to the question of why a Navy ship was only now sent to secure underwater infrastructure. He added that in the «new situation», the defense forces must be involved.

The defense minister found himself in a foolish situation because he had previously justified passivity in such situations instead of intervention, citing maritime law. He could not backtrack from the situation as quickly as needed and presented what happened on Christmas Day as a wake-up call for the Estonian state.

QUESTION 1

We ask Taavi Audo, project manager for government communication at the Government Office, how quickly did the Estonian state respond to the sabotage of Estlink 2?

On Christmas Day, immediately after the cables were damaged, information started moving at the operational level, and efforts were made to clarify the situation. Within the first hour, Elering and the Navy issued the necessary notifications, and coordination among various institutions continued from there.

At 1:01 p.m., information about the breakage reached the Government Office. From 2 p.m. onwards, there was also intensive communication with the Finns by the Government Office, the Police and Border Guard Board, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and others. Estonia offered assistance to the Finns in responding. Within the same hour, the suspicion of sabotage was also raised with the Finns.

The suspicion that it might not have been a technical failure was reported to the prime minister by the Situation Center of the Government Office (SITKE) at 3 p.m. on December 25. By that time, the vessels suspected of doing it had been identified. At 4 p.m., the Estonian and Finnish prime ministers communicated with each other.

On December 25, the primary role was played by institutions, companies, and ministries, which engaged in information exchange, situation assessment, coordination, and the prevention of potential threats to other infrastructure, in cooperation with Finland.

The Finns informed Estonia before 7 p.m. on December 25 that the vessel suspected of damaging the cable had been detained at sea, and preparations were started here for an emergency government meeting the following day to agree on further steps.

Immediately after the decision to detain the vessel, around 7 p.m., it became clear that two Elisa cables had also been cut. The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications was ready by 9 p.m. to issue a public notification about the communication cables, but since the cables were initially assessed to have been cut in Finnish waters, it was decided in agreement with the Finns to make this announcement the following day.

Around 8 p.m. on December 25, the prime minister decided to call an extraordinary government meeting at 4 p.m. on December 26. After the Cabinet meeting, at around 5:30 p.m. on December 26, the minister of defense and the defense forces decided to start a naval operation.

A coordinated notification by Finland and Estonia to the members of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), which includes 10 NATO countries, was made on the afternoon of December 25. On the evening of December 26, Prime Minister Kristen Michal spoke with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Also, on the evening of December 26, the first maritime cable-related contact took place between the Estonian Defense Forces' joint headquarters and the administration of the NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

Belated legislative amendment

After the Cabinet meeting of January 2, the Estonian government made it clear for the first time that, in the future, Estonia will act in exactly the same way as Finland vis-à-vis vessels dragging their anchor in a manner posing a danger in its economic zone.

At the government press conference a week earlier, which attracted extensive criticism, the talk had still been about increasing monitoring and presence, as well as the need to amend the maritime law, and deterrence. Against the backdrop of Finland's decisive action, this seemed like talking around in circles to the public, regardless of the chief of defense, Maj. Gen. Andrus Merilo, explicitly stating when commenting on the launch of the naval cable protection mission a day later that Estonia will protect its connections.

The most concrete statement at the December 26 press conference was made by Minister of Justice and Digital Affairs Liisa Pakosta (Estonia 200), who presented a proposal to toughen the Penal Code's section 406.

«We should not have to check whether a violation was intentional, because all cables are shown on navigational charts; a ship dropping its anchor, no matter in what fashion, immediately affects the ship's speed, trajectory, and steering, and if the ship continues its journey, there should be no need to separately ascertain intent,» she explained.

According to Pakosta, the bill began to be drafted the day before, on December 25.

The maritime sections of the current Penal Code are intended, in vernacular terms, to restrain drunken seafarers. When asked why was the legislative amendment not initiated a year ago, immediately after the sabotage of Balticconnector, the minister of justice suggested that the question be asked to the previous government.

Pakosta mentioned, among other things, that Finland and Poland have already made the corresponding changes to their laws. However, according to the minister, the need for amending the international law of the sea was also assessed in Estonia long before December 25.

The ostrich game on the seabed

«Until this incident, Estonia tended to bury its head in the sand and focus on why, legally, we couldn't do anything against foreign ships in our economic zone,» says Lott, the expert in maritime law. He adds that, unlike Estonia, Finland focused on how to be as well-prepared as possible for such an incident in its economic zone next time.

However, according to Lott, it is clear that taking control of a vessel in the economic zone would set a precedent. To our knowledge, a coastal state has only once boarded a foreign merchant ship in response to damage to a submarine cable outside its territorial sea, but without taking control of it. This was done by the United States in 1959 in the Atlantic Ocean with regard to the Soviet ship MV Novorossiysk, after American communications companies had reported a rupture in a submarine cable in the Atlantic.

Some install, others cut. A Norwegian cable ship installing the Estlink 2 electricity cable in Estonian coastal waters. Photo: Arvet Mägi/Virumaa Teataja

«However, maritime law is not set in stone and is characterized by its development primarily through the practice of states to provide solutions to new challenges. Finland has set an example here,» says Lott.

«We are ready to obstruct acts of sabotage against critical energy infrastructure like Finland did,» Ministry of Defense spokesman Roland Murof stated on January 2, adding that if the situation and conditions during an operation require and the rules allow the use of force, units of the defense forces are ready to do so. When the Estonian vessel went to sea on December 25, the Navy did not have all the necessary pre-authorizations for the use of force, which is also a sign that some preparatory work was incomplete and a potential boarding operation had not been mapped out in full.

The rules for the use of force are classified as a state secret, so their exact content is known only to those with the proper clearance. According to the Ministry of Defense, the current cable protection operation will continue for as long as necessary, meaning that no final date has been set at this stage.

On January 2, Justice Minister Pakosta confirmed to Postimees that, in Estonia's view, Finland acted in accordance with maritime law and that Estonia has no legal obstacles preventing it from acting in the same manner as Finland.

A complex operation requires practice

An important indicator of how seriously Estonia took the protection of undersea infrastructure after the Balticconnector incident is the exercises staged and their content.

In 2023, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications staged an exercise with communications companies and owners of communications cables to test the operational continuity of Estonian communications services in the event of a disruption of external connections, but it did not entail the obstruction of an attack.

According to the Government Office, the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) tabletop exercise Joint Protector 2024, which took place in Latvia in October, included the rehearsal of an underwater critical infrastructure attack scenario. As this was a tabletop exercise, no physical activities were conducted.

Joosep Kaasik, deputy secretary general for internal security at the Ministry of the Interior, says that no inter-agency «cable protection exercises» have been staged, but exercises related to the boarding of vessels have been conducted by institutions in the ministry's administrative area.

«This time, too, Estonia was ready to respond to the incident, with a Police and Border Guard Board helicopter and the K-komando [commandos unit – ed.) ready for takeoff, but considering the location of the incident, the response was left to the Finns. If something like this is attempted again, Estonia is certainly ready to respond forcefully,» Kaasik said.

According to Tori, the director of coordination at the Government Office, the Cabinet meeting of January 2 also received assurances from the agencies that «considering the limitations, we as a country are ready to intercept a ship and board it.» However, the staging of boarding exercises would allow not only to practice cooperation, but also to demonstrate our readiness and intentions to the adversary.

To ensure «deterrence» is more than just a buzzword

«As we saw on Christmas Day, Finland was successful in directing the Eagle S into its territorial waters, boarding the vessel, taking control of it, and arresting it,» says Lott. «It is essential to demonstrate readiness to board a vessel and prevent further destruction of our vital infrastructure also in the economic zone if the ship does not comply with the coastal state's orders.»

Lott believes that Finland was prepared to also take such a step to prevent further damage from the dragging of the anchor.

In his research and interviews, the researcher at the Norwegian Center for the Law of the Sea has argued that the maritime law does not exclude boarding a vessel in the economic zone and in certain cases – for example, in the case of the Balticconnector pipeline – explicitly allows it for reasons of protection of the marine environment.

The fight on the seabed is becoming more and more heated

Since 2021, more than ten cable sabotage incidents have taken place in the Euro-Atlantic region and more than 70 reports of Russian vessels acting abnormally in the vicinity of critical maritime infrastructure have been made public. Here are a few examples of how broad an area the cable war encompasses.

In April 2021, a 4.2-kilometer section of a fiber-optic cable equipped with underwater sensors was found to be missing in the Spitsbergen area of Norway. In November, the Norwegian authorities managed to locate the severed piece of cable 11 kilometers from its original location, in the Norwegian economic zone.

In October 2022, three communication cables broke near a submarine cable landing station off the coast of France. Vandalism or sabotage was also cited as the cause. A day later, it was reported that a communication cable between the Shetland Islands and Scotland had broken, a week after the rupture of a submarine communication cable between Shetland and the Faroe Islands. Coincidentally, Russian vessels were spotted repeatedly in the same area during these incidents.

In October 2023, a gas pipeline between Estonia and Finland in the Baltic Sea, as well as data cables connecting Estonia to Sweden and Finland, were broken. The leak in the gas pipeline was discovered in the Finnish economic zone. At the same time, a communication cable connecting Estonia to Finland was also damaged, and the day before, a communication cable between Estonia and Sweden located about 50 kilometers west of Hiiumaa was damaged.

In November 2024, an undersea communication cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden was broken, and the C-Lion1 undersea communication cable connecting Finland and Germany was cut in the Swedish economic zone. In December, the Estlink 2 electricity cable between Estonia and Finland was intentionally damaged.

Source: Report of the Estonian Academy of Security Sciences on «Security Threats to the Undersea Infrastructure of the Baltic States,» 2024

The most visible effort that Estonia has made after the Balticconnector incident is working to increase the presence of allies. According to the Government Office, following the Balticconnector incident, the JEF conducted two operations in the Baltic Sea.

The first crisis response took place at the end of November 2023, when 20 warships patrolled near underwater infrastructure from the Baltic Sea to the Danish straits. The next JEF operation took place in the summer of 2024, as part of the Nordic Warden exercise, where 30 warships from JEF member countries, along with air forces from various nations, operated in the Baltic Sea. The protection of underwater infrastructure was also one of the key topics discussed during the meeting of government leaders of the JEF member states in Tallinn in December.

According to information from the Ministry of Defense, NATO is expected to announce the launch of an operation in the Baltic Sea in the coming days. Whether, following the precedent set by Finland, the allies' maritime presence will have a greater (i.e. real) deterrent effect than before, we will see from the statistics on cable ruptures at the end of the year.

Techniques of cable war from more than 100 years ago

At the start of World War I, the British warship CS Alert cut German telegraph cables in the Atlantic, depriving the enemy of external communications. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A telegram arrived at the port of Dover just past midnight on August 5, 1914, the day after Britain declared war on Germany. It was in code, so its meaning would have been lost on anyone apart from its intended recipient, an officer named Superintendent Bourdeaux.

«We were taking a considerable risk,» Bourdeaux recounted in his report. At 1:52 he was on board a ship, the Alert, as it set sail. The bulk of the crew didn't know what their mission involved as the Alert arrived at its first destination at 03:15, lowered its hook to the seabed and began to dredge.

Bourdeaux and the Alert were undertaking one of the first strategic acts of information warfare in the modern world. A few hours later, the Alert had cut off almost all of Germany's communications with the outside world.

This episode of the undersea cable war gave the UK, which had the world's largest telegraph network at the time, a strategic advantage. The world's first deliberate cutting of submarine cables took place in 1898, when the United States cut submarine communication cables in the Philippines during a war with Spain.

The Paris Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables was signed even earlier, in March 1884. For example, it was under Article 10 of the Paris Convention that the Swedish and Danish authorities opened an investigation into the Chinese ship Yi Peng, which broke cables in the Baltic Sea in November 2024. BBC

* 1. Baltic Sea Submarine Cable, a data cable

2. EESF-2, a data cable

3. EESF-3, a data cable

4. FEC 1, a data cable

5. FEC 2, a data cable

6. Estlink 1, an electricity cable

7. Estlink 2, an electricity cable

8. Balticconnector, a gas pipeline

9. EE-S 1, a data cable

10. Tartu-Valmiera, an electricity cable

11. Tsirguliina-Valmiera, an electricity cable

12. EE-LV III, an electricity cable

13. Karksi-Latvia, a gas pipeline

14. Estonia-Latvia 1, a data cable

15. Estonia-Latvia 2, a data cable

16. Narva-Kingisepp, an electricity cable

17. Narva-St. Petersburg, an electricity cable

18. Tartu-Pskov, an electricity cable

19. Narva-Russia, a gas pipeline

20. Värska-Russia, a gas pipeline

21. Irboska-Inčukalns, a gas pipeline

22. Pskov-Riga, a gas pipeline

23. LV-SE 1, a data cable

24. Sweden-Latvia, a data cable

25. 4 transmission lines Latvia-Lithuania, electricity cable

26. Kiemenai, a gas pipeline

27. BCS East-West Interlink, a data cable

28. NordBalt, an electricity and data cable

29. Kaliningrad Cable, a data cable

30. Harmony Link, an electricity cable

31. LitPol Link 1, an electricity cable

32. LitPol Link 2, an electricity cable

33. GIPL transmission pipeline, a gas pipeline

34. Sakiai, a gas pipeline

35. Kotlovka, a gas pipeline

* Julgeolekuohud Balti riikide merealuste ühendustega seotud kriitilisele taristule [Security Threats to the Undersea Connections Related Critical Infrastructure of the Baltic States]. Tallinn: Sisekaitseakadeemia (Estonian Academy of Security Sciences), 2024