Undersea power cable linking Finland and Estonia suffers damage in latest Baltic Sea incident

A power cable linking Finland and Estonia under the Baltic Sea suffered an outage on Wednesday afternoon. It’s the latest in a series of incidents involving damage to telecom cables and energy pipelines in the Baltic Sea.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Finland’s Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said “The Estlink 2 electricity transmission connection between Finland and Estonia has been disconnected this afternoon.”

The Finnish national electricity transmission grid operator, Fingrid, said in a statement that the current disruption on the EstLink 2 cable occurred at 12:26 pm local time (11:26 am CET). They assured the public that the incident will result in power outages in Finland, stating that Helsinki had adequate supplies of power.

Estonian network operator Elering said there was enough spare capacity to meet power needs on the Estonian side.

The head of operations at Fingrid, Arto Pahkin, told Finnish broadcaster Yle that “possibility of sabotage cannot be ruled out”.

The Baltic Sea has witnessed multiple infrastructure incidents since the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Authorities have been on edge about undersea infrastructure in the Baltic. In November two date cables, one running between Finland and Germany, and another between Lithuania and Sweden were severed.

Before that, a Finnish-Estonian undersea gas pipeline was damaged in October as a Chinese cargo ship reportedly dropped its anchor.

The Nord Stream natural gas pipeline that once brought natural gas from Russia to Germany was damaged by underwater explosions in September 2022, authorities suspected the move to also be sabotage back then, going further and launching criminal probes.

Authorities continue to investigate these incidents across the Baltic Sea region as tensions hike, showing no signs of abating.