Finland finds Russian ‘spy’ ship anchor as subsea cable company demands ship’s seizure for compensation

Finnish authorities investigating a series of submarine cable breaks that took place on Christmas Day have located and retrieved an anchor suspected of being dragged along the Baltic Sea floor by the Eagle S, an alleged Russian spy ship.

The discovery was announced on Tuesday, at the same time that Cinia — a Finnish telecommunications company that owns and operates the C-Lion1 submarine cable, one of those that was broken — submitted a court application to seize the Eagle S so it could secure compensation over the break.

The Finnish police credited both Finland's Defence Forces and the Swedish Navy for their assistance in underwater diving operations and the effort to lift the anchor to the deck of Sweden’s HMS Belos, a submarine rescue vessel. Risto Lohi, a senior detective at Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation, said a technical examination of the anchor would now be carried out.

“The location where the anchor was found is along the Eagle S’s route, at the level of the Porkkala Peninsula,” Lohi said “The anchor was located towards the western end of the drag trace found on the seabed, near the point where the trace ends.” 

In its announcement, Cinia said repair work had been completed on the C-Lion1 ahead of schedule, courtesy of specialist equipment brought from France by the repair vessel Cable Vigilance, which was dispatched as soon as a fault was detected.

The suspected culprit behind the damage, the Eagle S, has been seized and transferred to the oil port of Kilpilahti in Porvoo, east of Helsinki, while investigators continue to analyze devices from the ship and question its crew on suspicion of aggravated criminal mischief. Last week, the NBI said eight of the ship’s crew — an increase from the initial seven — had been issued with travel bans so they could continue to be questioned.

Cinia said its application to the Helsinki District Court “demands the seizure of the vessel Eagle S, which has been linked to cable damages in the Gulf of Finland, to secure [Cinia’s] claims for compensation.”

It is the second time that the C-Lion1 submarine cable has been damaged in recent months. In the first incident, the suspected culprit — a Chinese cargo ship named Yi Peng 3 — departed from the Russian port of Ust-Luga on November 15 and is believed to have been sailing with its AIS signal switched off in proximity to the C-Lion1 cable just as a fault was detected on November 18.

After being boarded in international waters by German and Swedish investigators, with some pushback by Chinese authorities — leading Sweden to criticize China for refusing to allow its investigators full access to the vessel — the Yi Peng 3 ultimately weighed anchor and sailed on towards Egypt on December 21.

The Christmas Day cable breaks attributed to the Eagle S, which also set sail from Ust-Luga, was responded to immediately by Finnish authorities who dispatched armed units to board the ship by helicopter later on the evening of the incident.

The breaks come amid heightened concern over a range of Russian sabotage and subversion activities, and are the latest to highlight how vulnerable subsea cables are to sabotage as well as to accidental cuts.

According to a report from the shipping publication Lloyd’s List, the Eagle S previously had “abnormal” equipment on board that the publication’s source suspected had been used to monitor NATO naval and aircraft radio communications and to drop “sensors-type devices” in the English Channel.

Sweden, Germany and Lithuania all launched criminal investigations following the Yi Peng 3 incident in November. That month, the United Nations and other international agencies created an advisory body focused on the protection of submarine cables in the wake of dozens of incidents in which they were broken.