The Anchor Problem: A Finnish Court Just Reopened the Baltic Cable Case
On 27 August the Helsinki Court of Appeal handed down a ruling that got very little attention outside Finland and Estonia, and that matters more than most of what did.
It concerns a tanker called the Eagle S, a power cable called Estlink 2, and a question that has quietly governed the whole of the Baltic Sea's infrastructure crisis: when a foreign-flagged ship damages critical infrastructure on the seabed, whose courts can try the crew?
For most of the last three years the working answer has been: possibly nobody's.
What happened on Christmas Day 2024
At 12:26 on 25 December 2024, Estlink 2 failed. It is one of the power interconnectors between Finland and Estonia, and cross-border capacity dropped from 1,016 megawatts to 358. Four telecommunications cables were damaged the same day.
Finnish authorities identified the Eagle S, an oil tanker registered in the Cook Islands, carrying 35,000 tonnes of unleaded gasoline and — a detail worth holding on to — without valid insurance. Investigators concluded the ship had dragged its anchor across the seabed.
On 26 December, Finnish forces boarded the vessel in Finnish territorial waters using armed helicopters. It was seized and moved to Porvoo. On 3 January 2025 the Helsinki District Court upheld the seizure, and eight crew members were placed under travel bans.
Finnish authorities described the Eagle S as part of what is usually called the shadow fleet — an estimated several hundred ageing tankers operating under flags of convenience, opaque ownership and thin or absent insurance, used to move sanctioned oil.
The pattern it belongs to
Estlink 2 was not an isolated event, and the sequence is worth setting out because the individual incidents blur together.
September 2022 — the Nord Stream pipelines are ruptured by explosions.
October 2023 — the Balticconnector gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia is badly damaged, along with the EE-S1 data cable between Sweden and Estonia.
November 2024 — the BCS East-West Interlink and the C-Lion1 cable, which runs from Helsinki to Rostock, are damaged.
25 December 2024 — Estlink 2 and four telecoms cables.
Turn of the year 2024–25 — a fibre link between Helsinki and Tallinn operated by Elisa is disrupted. Finland seizes the cargo ship Fitburg; an Azerbaijani crew member is arrested and a Russian crew member placed under a travel ban. The same vessel is suspected of damaging two further cables.
January 2025 — a fibre-optic cable belonging to Latvia's State Radio and Television Centre is damaged.
By early 2025, tallies of at least eleven damaged Baltic cables in fifteen months were circulating. NATO responded in the winter of 2024–25 with Baltic Sentry, a multinational surveillance operation using maritime patrol aircraft, surface ships and drones — built less to physically prevent anchor-dragging, which is close to impossible, than to remove deniability by watching who is where.
Estlink 2 was repaired by June 2025, at a cost in the tens of millions of euros.
The part nobody can prove
Here is where honest reporting has to slow down.
The pattern looks deliberate. Baltic and Nordic governments have treated it as hybrid activity. The vessels involved have repeatedly been shadow-fleet ships with Russian connections.
But attribution has not been established in any court, and it is worth being precise about why. Anchor-dragging is the ideal deniable method: it is indistinguishable, in physical evidence, from gross incompetence. A poorly maintained ship with an undertrained crew genuinely can drag an anchor for miles without noticing. Proving that a captain intended to cut a cable requires evidence about a state of mind aboard a foreign vessel with a foreign crew, weeks after the fact.
In January 2025 the Washington Post, citing US intelligence assessments, reported that the incidents were more likely accidents than the result of orders from Russian officials. Nordic governments and investigators publicly rejected that reading. The disagreement has not been resolved.
This publication is not in a position to settle it, and neither is anybody else with access only to the public record. What can be said is that a great many cables have been cut, by a specific type of vessel, in a specific sea, during a specific war — and that no court has yet convicted anyone.
The ruling that made it worse, and the one that undid it
On 3 October 2025, the Helsinki District Court dismissed the criminal charges against the Eagle S officers.
Not because it found them innocent. Because it found that Finland had no jurisdiction.
The reasoning followed the law of the sea as the court read it: the damage occurred outside Finnish territorial waters, the ship was flagged to the Cook Islands, and the crew were foreign nationals. Any prosecution, the court held, belonged in the courts of the flag state or of the crew's home countries.
Consider what that means in practice. The flag state was the Cook Islands — a country of about 15,000 people in the South Pacific, some fourteen thousand kilometres from the Gulf of Finland, with no realistic interest in or capacity for prosecuting the matter. The crew's home countries were elsewhere again.
If that ruling had stood, it would have amounted to a published instruction: damage to European seabed infrastructure by a ship flagged somewhere convenient is effectively unprosecutable. Given that the shadow fleet exists precisely to arrange convenient flags, this was not a small hole.
Finland's deputy prosecutor appealed. The Court of Appeal accepted the case for review in January 2026.
And on 27 August 2026, it overturned the dismissal.
The appeal court found that Finland does have jurisdiction, on the grounds that the events directly affected the country — and, importantly, that the incidents fall outside the definition of a maritime accident under international law, which is what the jurisdictional restrictions were written to cover. The case goes back to the district court. Leave to appeal to the Supreme Court may still be sought.
That second finding is the substantive one. The district court had, in effect, treated a cut cable as a shipping accident and applied the accident rules. The appeal court declined to.
Why the law is so weak here
The framework was not designed for this.
Submarine cables have been protected by international agreement since the 1880s, in an era when the realistic threats were fishing gear and ordinary maritime carelessness. The modern law of the sea gives coastal states extensive rights over resources in their exclusive economic zones and deliberately limited rights over the conduct of foreign-flagged vessels passing through them. Freedom of navigation was the value being protected, and it is a real one.
The result is a sea where the most consequential infrastructure in the region — power interconnectors, data links, gas pipelines — lies in waters where the states that depend on it have thin authority over the ships above it.
The Baltic is a particularly bad case: shallow, narrow, crowded, and ringed by countries whose electricity and connectivity depend on a small number of physical links. Cutting one is cheap. Repairing one takes months and tens of millions of euros. Proving who meant to do it may be impossible.
Why this belongs in a North American publication
Three reasons.
The first is that this is the security story of the region our readers come from, and it is being covered in North America almost entirely as an occasional curiosity about mysterious cable cuts.
The second is that the legal question is not regional. The same anchor, the same flag-of-convenience registration and the same jurisdictional gap apply off Ireland, off Taiwan, off the coast of California. There are around 1.5 million kilometres of submarine cable carrying the overwhelming majority of international data traffic, and the Helsinki Court of Appeal has just issued one of the first serious judicial statements about whether a coastal state can prosecute damage to it. That reasoning will be read in a lot of other jurisdictions.
The third is the one this publication has written about before. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have built an unusual amount of national life on digital infrastructure — Estonia most of all, where identity, voting, health records and government itself run through networks that reach the rest of the world along a small number of cables under this sea.
A country that has put its administration online has, without quite intending to, made a set of undersea cables into constitutional infrastructure.
Which is a reasonable thing to do, right up until somebody drops an anchor.
Sources
Yle News on the Helsinki Court of Appeal's 27 August 2026 ruling on jurisdiction in the Eagle S case.
“Seabed zero: Baltic sabotage and the global risks to undersea infrastructure”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 2026.
Contemporaneous reporting and case records on the 2024 Estlink 2 incident, including the Helsinki District Court's 3 October 2025 dismissal on jurisdictional grounds.
NATO on Operation Baltic Sentry.
Note on attribution: no court has established responsibility for any of the incidents described here. Where investigators, governments or intelligence assessments have reached differing conclusions, we have said so rather than choosing between them.
