A cargo ship severed an undersea telecommunications cable in the Gulf of Finland on Wednesday in what the Finnish police said they suspected was an act of sabotage that led them to seize the vessel.
The ship, the Fitburg, was en route from St. Petersburg in Russia to the port of Haifa in Israel when it damaged a cable connecting the capitals of Helsinki in Finland and Tallinn in Estonia, the authorities said.
The vessel was sailing under the flag of the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines at the time of the episode, which officials said happened around 5 a.m. local time.
The cut did not disrupt service, according to Elisa, the Finnish telecommunications company that operates the cable.
In a statement, Elisa said that its network was designed and secured with multiple routes, so services are not disrupted if a connection is cut. Details about the depth and thickness of the cable were not available.
The Finnish authorities said on Wednesday that they were investigating the incident as “aggravated criminal damage, attempted aggravated criminal damage, and aggravated interference with telecommunications.”
On Wednesday, officials stopped short of pointing fingers at a possible foreign actor.
“Hopefully it was not a deliberate act, but the investigation will clarify,” Alar Karis, Estonia’s president, said on social media of the damage to the cable. “The Estonian and Finnish authorities are working closely together to gather additional information.”
The section of cable that was damaged was in Estonia’s “exclusive economic zone,” according to investigators, who said that the Fitburg was intercepted in Finnish waters with its anchor lowered into the sea.
A tactical team with the Finnish Border Guard rappelled to the ship’s deck from helicopters before seizing the vessel and taking custody of its 14 crew members, the authorities said. The crew members were from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Russia.
According to maritime records, the ship is managed and operated by Albros Shipping and Trading Ltd., which is based in Istanbul. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
A second telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia experienced an outage on Wednesday, though it was not immediately clear if the two events were connected.
It was not the first time that an undersea cable in the Baltic region has been damaged.
In November 2024, Germany’s defense minister said that the severing of two fiber-optic cables in the Baltic Sea within one day of each other was an act of sabotage aimed at European countries that were supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia.
One of those cables connects Finland and Germany and the other runs between Lithuania and Sweden.
Last December, the Finnish authorities seized an oil tanker on the suspicion that it was involved in cutting vital undersea cables and said that the ship might have been part of Russia’s “shadow fleet,” aimed at evading Western restrictions.
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
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