Finland’s border authority is investigating a Russian naval vessel’s alleged intrusion into its territorial sea last week in the latest friction on NATO’s new northeastern flank.
The unarmed research ship with the Russian navy’s hydrographic service sailed in Finland’s restricted waters in the Gulf of Finland without authorization on July 26, according to a statement, and the incident is now being reviewed by the Finnish Border Guard.
Finland joined NATO in April 2023 and extended the alliance’s boundaries thanks to its 830-mile land border with Russia, which also shares maritime borders in the Gulf of Finland with Estonia, another NATO member.
Coastal states can claim territorial sea limits of up to 12 nautical miles under the U.N.’s Law of the Sea Treaty. This previously left no high seas in the gulf because of its narrow shape, but a 1994 bilateral agreement between Finland and Estonia opened a six-mile international waterway in the Baltic Sea‘s easternmost arm.
The gulf also contains some of Russia’s most important sea lines, including for naval deployments from St. Petersburg and oil trade from Primorsk, two major Baltic ports.
Newsweek‘s map shows where the Russian ship—later identified as the Baltic Fleet hydrographic vessel Mikhail Kazansky—crossed into Finnish waters for a reported seven minutes and failed to response to radio communications.
Petter Stauffer, the Finnish Border Guard’s chief investigator, said the violation happened approximately 1.2 nautical miles south of the town of Hamina, according to the Helsingin Sanomat, Finland‘s largest newspaper.
The Mikhail Kazansky, which is equipped for seabed research and other underwater works, was escorted away by a Finnish patrol boat. The probe will determine whether the vessel violated any laws, Stauffer said.
The area in question appeared to overlap a now-deleted Russian government announcement about a unilateral change to its sea borders with Finland and Lithuania. It was not enforced and later played down as an administrative error.
Russia‘s defense ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Mikhail Kazansky displaces just over 100 tons and was the first of the upgraded Project 23370G class to be commissioned into service in December 2019.
The Catamaran-style research ship was built at the Vyborg Shipyard in Russia’s northwestern Leningrad region bordering Finland. Its sea trials were held in the Gulf of Finland.
Finland last accused its neighbor of violating its territorial boundaries in mid-June, when it said four Russian military planes crossed 1.5 miles into Finnish airspace in the gulf, leading to a formal rebuke, known as a demarche.
NATO members regularly intercept Russian ships and aircraft near their sea and airspace, while alliance planes also operate near Russia’s southwestern borders to monitor the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Last week, U.S. and Canadian fighter jets were scrambled to track a joint Russian and Chinese bomber flight in the north Pacific that had crossed into Alaska’s air defense zone.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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