The possibility that a power cable under the Baltic Sea between Finland and Estonia has been sabotaged is being investigated after it stopped working on Christmas Day.
Authorities in both countries are examining whether a foreign ship may have been involved, without naming the vessel.
It’s the latest in a series of incidents in the region in which undersea cables appear to have been damaged.
The Estlink-2 cable suffered a sudden failure on Wednesday, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said.
“The police, in cooperation with the Border Guard and other authorities, are investigating the chain of events of the incident,” Finnish police said in a statement.
There was no power loss to citizens in either Estonia or Finland during the outage, with Estonia saying they had enough spare capacity to meet power needs, public broadcaster ERR said on its website.
But the 658 megawatt (MW) Estlink 2 power interconnector remained offline following the outage that began at midday local time, leaving only the 358 MW Estlink 1 in operation between the two countries, operator Fingrid said.
Baltic Sea nations are on high alert for potential acts of sabotage following a string of outages of power cables, telecom
links and gas pipelines since 2022, although subsea equipment is also subject to technical malfunction and accidents.
Yesterday’s incident comes after the Balticconnector gas pipeline linking Finland and Estonia was damaged last year, along with several telecoms cables.
Finnish police investigating that incident said it was likely caused by a ship dragging its anchor.
Read more from Sky News:
King Charles’s Christmas message in full
‘Panic sets in’ for family of British dad missing in Spain
It comes as Swedish police are leading an investigation into the breach last month of two Baltic Sea telecom cables, in an incident German defence minister Boris Pistorius has said he assumed was caused by sabotage.
The Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that once brought natural gas from Russia to Germany were damaged by underwater explosions in September 2022.
Authorities have termed it sabotage and launched criminal probes.
