Four months after the natural gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia was severely damaged, the discussion has flared on if it was really an accident, or sabotage anyway, has flared up again. Estonian national radio ERR is investigating.
Featured image: on the bridge of a Finnish Navy/Border Guard operation
(Archive press photo by the Finnish Border Guard)
The Baltic Connector links the Finnish and Estonian natural gas supplies, through a 152 kilometre long pipeline. About 77 kilometres lies underneath the Gulf of Finland. Its capacity is almost a million cubic metres of gas per day, but plans call for expansion to 2.6 million m3 per day.
On 8 October 2023, around 02:00 in the night Finnish time, a leak was discovered in the Baltic Connector. The nearby 240 kilometre long key telecommunications line EE-S1 between Sweden and Estonia also suffered damage around the same time. The Finnish and Estonian gas companies immediately closed the flow of gas.
Chinese and Russian ships suspected
In the weeks that followed Finnish, Swedish and Estonian authorities moved from what they initially called suspected sabotage to “an accident”. The Chinese container ship Newnew Polar Bear, sailing under the flag of Hong Kong, was to blame. It apparently has dragged and lost its anchor while passing through the Gulf of Finland on its way to its destination port in Russia. It was photographed on 22 October in Arkhangelsk, missing an anchor.
Subsequently, the Finnish Navy and Finnish Border Guard retrieved an anchor from the seabed on 24 October. As the authorities concluded, it must have been an accident. The suspicion of the second vessel in the neighbourhood, the world’s only nuclear-powered ice-breaker/merchant ship Sevmorput owned by Russian Rosatom, was dropped. But investigative journalists of Estonian ERR now say, was this the right conclusion?
All under Russian control
As the radio investigators argue, the Newnew Polar Bear’s shipping company has a complicated structure, with both Chinese and Russian in the ownership. But according to their conclusions, it does not matter. They argue it was all under Russian control, as Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom gave the assignment to the 169-metre long Newnew Polar Bear. And it was given the escort of the 260-long Sevmorput to make it from Saint Petersburg to the arctic port of Arkhangelsk. | © 2024 Marcel Burger, nordicreporter.com
Want to know more?
Read ERR’s Mihkel Kärmas’ report “Balticconnector case more sabotage than an accident, experts say” here at News.err.ee