A Chinese container vessel and a Russian-flagged ship investigated in connection with damage to a gas pipeline in the Gulf of Finland were present at about the time that two telecommunications cables were damaged, vessel tracking data show.
Early on Oct. 8, a gas pipeline and a telecom cable connecting Finland and Estonia were broken, in what Finnish investigators say may have been sabotage. On Oct. 17, Sweden stated that a third link, connecting Stockholm to Tallinn, had been damaged at roughly the same time as the other two.
Two Ships Present
Only two ships were present at all three sites at about the time when the damage occurred, according to data from MarineTraffic, a ship-tracking and maritime analytics provider.The ships are the NewNew Polar Bear, a Chinese container ship that was traveling between China and Europe via the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic, and the Sevmorput, a nuclear-powered cargo vessel transiting between Murmansk and St. Petersburg.
Finnish investigators in charge of the pipeline investigation are probing both ships, as well as others, they said on Oct. 17.
Based on vessel tracking data, Reuters matched the ships’ path with the locations where the damage occurred at all three sites.
The locations match the movements of military and service vessels deployed to investigate the incidents.
Finnish and Estonian authorities have also established restricted navigation zones around the incident sites in the Gulf of Finland.
In the first incident, which involved the Swedish–Estonian telecom cable, the NewNew Polar Bear passed over the link at 6:13 p.m. EET (3:13 p.m. GMT) on Oct. 7, while the Sevmorput passed over the cable at 8:08 p.m. EET, roughly 2.6 nautical miles west of the incident site.
The cable’s operator, Arelion, stated that the incident occurred in the “afternoon of Oct. 7.” It declined to give a specific time.
In the second incident, involving the gas pipeline linking Finland and Estonia, the NewNew Polar Bear passed over the infrastructure at 1:20 a.m. EET on Oct. 8 (10:20 p.m. GMT on Oct. 7), while the Sevmorput passed over it eight minutes earlier, at 1:12 a.m. EET.
The time that the NewNew Polar Bear crossed the pipeline matches when Norwegian seismologists registered a small seismic event in the pipeline’s vicinity.
The pipeline’s operators, Gasgrid and Elering, have said that the gas leak occurred between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. EET on Oct. 8 (10 p.m. and 11 p.m. GMT on Oct. 7).
In the third incident, on the Finland–Estonia telecom link, the NewNew Polar Bear crossed it at 2:49 a.m. EET on Oct. 8 (11:49 p.m. GMT on Oct. 7), while the Sevmorput crossed it at 2:26 a.m. EET the same day (11:26 p.m. GMT on Oct. 7).
The cable’s operator, Elisa, has declined to say when the damage occurred. The Estonian Navy stated that the cable was damaged about two hours after the Balticconnector incident.
NewNew Shipping, owner and operator of the NewNew Polar Bear, declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.
The Russian authority responsible for nuclear-powered vessels, Atomflot, has denied to Reuters that one of its ships had been involved. On Oct. 20, it declined to give fresh comment.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed the idea that Russia damaged the Finnish–Estonia gas pipeline as “rubbish.”
