The Eagle S tanker, suspected of cutting undersea cables, is seen on 29 December 2024 anchored off Finland's Kilpilahti oil terminal with a 24 hour escort provided by Finnish Border Guard vessel Uisko . (John Pagni)
Finnish investigators say they have found a kilometres-long “dragging track” suspected to have been from the anchor of Eagle S , a Cook Island-flagged tanker that sailed from Russia and is thought to have cut one undersea power cable and damaged four communication cables on 25 and 26 December before being impounded in Finnish waters.
The Eagle S was identified as a vessel of interest due to its presence in the area of the cables at the time of the breakages. It had been observed cutting its speed and lingering over the Estlink 2 electricity cable.
The Estlink 2 was cut on 25 December around 1226 h local time, when power was running at a capacity of 658 MW to Estonia. Estlink 2 runs from the east of Helsinki to landfall in eastern Estonia with grid operators saying it might not be back in service before August.
Estlink 1, with its smaller capacity of 350 MW, located to the west of both countries' capitals, was unaffected. Power usually flows from Finland to Estonia as it was doing at the time of the outage.
On 26 December four telecommunications cables were damaged or disrupted. Two are operated by Finnish telecom company Elisa and the third by China's CITIC Telecom. The last, C-Lion1, connects Finland to Germany and is owned by Finnish public telecom company Cinia.
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