December 9, 2025: In August Finnish prosecutors charged the captain and two senior officers of the tanker Eagle S with aggravated criminal mischief and aggravated interference with communications by dragging the ship’s anchor for 90 kilometers along the subsurface terrain. This ruptured the Estlink 2 undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia as well as four internet lines. Prompt repairs to restore service cost $70 million, with complete restoration of power and internet service costing even more. Nations bordering the Baltic Sea have been nervously anticipating and preparing for sabotage after a string of outages of power cables, gas pipelines and telecoms, although subsea infrastructure is also subject to technical malfunctions and outages caused by accidents. The Eagle S disruption caused serious risks to energy supply and telecommunications in Finland

The year began with a fiber optic cable between Latvia and Sweden being damaged by parties unknown. Over the last few years more than a dozen Baltic Sea underwater cables have been damaged or cut. These cables can be repaired in a few weeks, but local Coast Guard officials consider most of these incidents deliberate and that makes them criminal.

Over the last year there have been several underwater cables cut in the Baltic Sea. The damage was done using anchors dragged across the seabed. The common factor in all this was Russia and its oil smuggling operation. The economic sanctions on Russia because of the Ukraine War have made Russia desperate. Russia has a fleet of tankers that operate in the shadows to smuggle Russian oil. The more the Russians carry out these acts, the more the sanctions are increased. Countries bordering the Baltic formed a force of patrol boats that patrolled areas where underwater cables were. If a Russian ship moved into the area anyway, local navies would send out a warship and board the Russian vessel for a chat.

Russia is not the first nation to attack the hundreds of underwater cable networks around the world. In 2009 the U.S. Navy found itself defending underwater Internet cables. That's where most of the planet's Internet traffic spends most of its time, as it travels from continent to continent via fiber-optic cables. The navy proposed to undertake more aggressive operations to prevent terrorists, or hostile nations, from trying to cut these cables.