Tensions With Russia Rise Amid Power Line Sabotage

Russia’s connection to the rupture of an undersea cable between Finland and Estonia is raising a new bevy of fears over the sabotage of critical power lines.

The new incidents come as tensions between the West and Russia and China have risen over the war in Ukraine, and as the world braces for a shift in U.S. leadership as President-elect Trump prepares to take office. 

The Estlink-2 power cable between Finland and Estonia was allegedly cut on Christmas by a Cook Island-flagged ship called Eagle S. Western officials claim the ship is part of a vast Russian shadow fleet working to circumvent western sanctions. 

The incident adds to a larger problem related to the security of undersea infrastructure, as China has also been accused of three incidents since 2023 that have disrupted power lines in European waters.

Dozens of cables are ruptured each year, usually accidentally, and it’s unclear if the latest events were intentional. Still, European leaders are sounding the alarm. 

“Recent Baltic Sea sabotage attempts are not isolated incidents; they form a deliberate pattern aimed at damaging our digital and energy infrastructure,” said European Union foreign policy head Kaja Kallas in an interview with German newspaper Welt. 

Tensions between the Russia have been simmering for years over the Ukraine war. Russia is also suspected by Azerbaijan’s leaders of shooting down an airliner on Christmas Day, killing 38 people.

Finland is investigating the Estlink-2 incident, which caused minimal disruption, but it said this week that an anchor suspected to be from the Eagle S was dragged up to 62 miles under the water. The Eagle S was seized by Finnish police last week.

The case is similar to a November incident, in which the Chinese carrier ship Yi Peng 3 is accused of dragging an anchor to cut cables linking Sweden and Lithuania and another connecting Germany and Finland. 

In November 2023, a Hong Kong ship was responsible for rupturing a critical gas pipeline between Estonia and Finland. 

They are not the first such attacks, following the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. Reports suggest Ukraine was likely behind the attack on Nord Stream, which carries gas from Russia to Germany. 

“These incidents show how the Russia-China axis is increasingly working in sync,” wrote Jakub Janda and James Corera of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, warning the cuts “look like a trend that we shouldn’t ignore or tolerate.” 

“Political will, and unity of purpose, is needed to make clear this is intolerable,” they wrote.

Much of the world’s internet connectivity between is enabled by the more than 600 active and planned undersea cables around the world.

They have long been seen as at risk. 

A December report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warned that “subsea cable systems and the data that flow through them are vulnerable to hacks, espionage, and other cyber risks,” in addition to physical threats. 

Sophia Besch and Erik Brown, European fellows at Carnegie, said in the report that the West lacks a unified response to protecting subsea infrastructure. They argued that Europe should “invest in developing new undersea infrastructure protection technology, allocate more resources to support Europe’s market leaders in subsea cable installation and repair, and work with partners to ensure secure and trusted end-to-end supply chains.”

European officials are now calling for NATO to bolster undersea infrastructure protections. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said last week the alliance “will enhance its military presence in the Baltic Sea.” 

According to German media, that country’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in an interview last week that the spate of recent incidents were a “wake-up call” for Berlin. 

“Ships are currently damaging important submarine cables in the Baltic Sea almost every month. Crews lower anchors into the water, drag them for miles across the seabed for no apparent reason and then lose them when trying to pull them up,” she said. “In a digitalised world, submarine cables are the communication arteries that hold our world together.” 

NATO in 2023 warned that Russia had mapped western undersea cables and that Moscow posed a risk to the critical infrastructure, with the alliance at the time announcing a new center tasked with defending vulnerable undersea areas. 

After the Nord Stream attacks, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned that Moscow could attack undersea cables in retaliation. 

International agreements exist to protect undersea infrastructure, including Article 113 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that makes it a punishable offense to willfully or negligently disrupt an undersea cable.  

But the rules have been criticized for not providing accountability, as disruptions in international waters allows for a decision on punishment from the responsible country.

The concerns of nations disregarding the rules have only grown. In September, the U.S. led a coalition of nations calling for, among other things, states to “comply with applicable international law.” 

The undersea cable industry is primarily built and operated by U.S. and allied nations: the American company SubCom, French business Alcatel Submarine Networks and Japan’s Nippon Electric Company.  

A small percentage of ownership comes from Chinese company HMN Technologies, and Beijing is moving to increase its market share in subsea cables. 

An August report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said that undersea cables are a “highly consequential theater of great power competition.” 

CSIS said both Russia and China pose threats to the infrastructure, but that Moscow, as a continental power with internet connectivity over land, “views this infrastructure as a critical point of leverage against the security of Western nations.” 

Researchers said it was critical for the U.S. to invest more in cable repair, increase the size of cable repair ships and work to boost security and protection through the International Cable Protection Committee, which is made up of governments and companies invested in undersea infrastructure. 

“The threats posed by state actors—particularly Russia and China—highlight the urgent need for measures to protect this infrastructure,” they wrote.