The possibility that a power cable under the Baltic Sea between Finland and Estonia has been sabotaged is being investigated after it stopped working on Christmas Day. Authorities in both countries are examining whether a foreign ship may have been involved, without naming the vessel.
It's the latest in a series of incidents in the region in which undersea cables appear to have been damaged. The Estlink-2 cable suffered a sudden failure on Wednesday, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said. "The police, in cooperation with the Border Guard and other authorities, are investigating the chain of events of the incident," Finnish police said in a statement.
There was no power loss to citizens in either Estonia or Finland during the outage, with Estonia saying they had enough spare capacity to meet power needs, public broadcaster ERR said on its website. But the 658 megawatt (MW) Estlink 2 power interconnector remained offline following the outage that began at midday local time, leaving only the 358 MW Estlink 1 in operation between the two countries, operator Fingrid said.
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Be the first to get Breaking News. Install the Sky News app for free. Baltic Sea nations are on high alert for potential acts of sabotage following a string of outages of power cables, telecomlinks and gas pipelines since 2022, although subsea equipment is also subject to technical malfunction and accidents.
